#94, "Ladders To Fire," Merrick (2001)

150 Favorite Songs: #94, "Ladders To Fire," Merrick (2001)

Here's another secret gem for you that I am confident you have not yet heard. Thank me later.

Merrick were an early-‘00s Los Angeles indie rock band. I found them when I was twenty-one and working as a volunteer, checking in artists, management, and press during SXSW in exchange for a free badge. I checked in their singer. She was pretty and told me I should come to her band’s showcase, so I did. They played at a coffee shop downtown, and even in a small venue, it wasn’t very crowded—that’s just part of how SXSW has always worked, if you’re an obscure band without a following. It’s easy to get swept up by the hype, but the actual reality of it for most young, independent acts is at odds with the image of the festival. If there are a thousand people standing around because they heard a rumor that Solange was playing somewhere, that’s a thousand people who aren’t at your show. You can actually tell a lot about a band by how they respond to that disappointment—do they phone it in and try to get it over with as quickly as possible, or do they decide that the eleven people at the show will for damn sure remember their name? Merrick were in the latter group.

After the show, I worked up the nerve to ask the singer if she wanted to get a milkshake. (I was trying out a quirky-dude thing, it didn’t last.) She very kindly declined, but gave me copies of their CDs, and “Ladders To Fire” was on it.

They didn’t play it that night, but it’s so much of what I love in music. It’s all incredibly evocative, creepy and haunting and intense. The tones are ominous, and the lyrics are image-heavy, not necessarily anything that makes literal sense but definitely capable of conjuring scenes in your head. It sounds great, too, with that violin running through the song and the guitar plucked in a way that makes sure you can hear the strings, that you know a person made this record, and the vocals layered between the two members in the band so you can’t quite tell who’s singing lead and who’s backing up. And then it gets pretty in the chorus, just to remind you that these voices that drone lines about “share the dirty mattress like it’s something eclectic / with the ants, with the gargles and your goddamn electric” can also carry a melody, that they’ve just chosen not to. Listening to it right now, I kind of feel like it should be higher up on the list, but there are so many songs I love. The song’s title comes from a book by Anaïs Nin, and it’s possible that the imagery does, too. I never read it.

The post-script to “Ladders To Fire” is that, while Merrick is a mostly-forgotten early-‘00s indie rock band, the singer who gave me the CD is not off wallowing in obscurity. Her name is Inara George, and she went on to have a modestly successful solo career after this band, and an even more successful turn as part of the jazzy, lite-synthpop duo The Bird And The Bee.

Those songs are still good, and her voice is still incredible, but none of them capture my ear quite the way that “Ladders To Fire” did. That’s not really a surprise—that SXSW was a lifetime ago, and I’ve been a lot of different people in the years since, so of course she would be, too. In the end, I’m just happy I got “Ladders To Fire.”