MERRICK WINTER RELEASES RAW, EMOTIVE AND HAUNTING NEW INDIE-FOLK SINGLE ‘TRY ME’
Merrick Winter is a singer-songwriter and producer, based between London and Los Angeles. He has collaborated with numerous folk and pop artists including Ivor Novello Rising Star winner Victoria Canal, Grammy Winner Madison Cunningham, and indie artists like Flyte, Khushi, and Gabriella Eva. The product of a transatlantic musical upbringing, his new single ‘Try Me’ draws narrative inspiration from a tragedy in small-town midwest America.
“‘Try Me’ is a song about the wave of successive school shootings that have swept across America since I was a child,” explains Winter. “So often the perpetrators are kids. Recently I discovered that a similar tragedy had happened in my hometown after I left, and suddenly the narrative became very real, very personal. It deeply affected my community, and really got under my skin. I wanted to write a song that explored how it might happen in any small town in America, but I wanted to do it with empathy – to just imagine for myself how it could have gone so wrong.”
“Something I notice is that blame for school shootings gets shifted around as a political tool, and the human factors that lead to them – mental health, inequality, the crisis of masculinity – are overshadowed by a narrative of good and evil. The response is likewise reduced to ‘thoughts and prayers’. But when you know both the victims and the perpetrators personally, it just seems totally ineffective. The title ‘Try Me’ came from watching a courtroom proceeding and realizing that when some of these kids commit these atrocities, they are children under the eyes of the law, but they are men when they go to trial. For me, the song is a kind of tired sigh – it’s putting my hands up in the air, stepping back and just observing the issue. I’m not trying to pass judgment, just trying to understand. I would hesitate to call the song a murder ballad, (though it certainly draws from that lineage) simply because that implies romanticism – there is nothing romantic about the events in ‘Try Me’, only a kind of bitter resignation to the facts.”
Merrick’s debut EP is due for release September 2023, and recent performances include, the The Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles, a sold out show at London’s Brunel Museum for Earth Percent, as part of the songwriting collective ‘The Circle’, and the Musée Sauvage in Paris for ‘Fête de la Musique 2023’.