Merritt Gibson

George Bernard Shaw is often credited with the assertion that “youth is wasted on the young.” Merritt Gibson challenges this notion wholeheartedly and out loud. A “wise beyond her years” outlook on life and unmistakable self-confidence led Gibson to the realization that she needed to transcend the typical high school experience. Enter songwriting.

Now at 18, Gibson crafts songs with a seamless musical and lyrical balance of both mystery and familiarity, of grand emotion and real life. She views songwriting as an intensely personal process that produces universally understood themes. Gibson is on a quest to learn and comprehend the enigmatic nature of the world and of human nature itself. Common in her music are themes of love and friendship, loyalty and betrayal, her writing at turns innocent and jaded.

Like classic songwriters of the past and present, Gibson strives to craft songs that truly mean something. That “something” may be a narration on falling in and out of love, a saga of growing up, advice to other young women, or a deeper understanding of the self. From a wide range of inspiration and sources, Gibson creates a holistic view of what it means to be a young woman today. She states “my songs are the synthesis of my life and the lives I observe and imagine.” Her brand of songwriting is marked by the fact that it is not a one-sided process or based on a single viewpoint, but rather on a reciprocal relationship of thought and emotion that she hopes to establish with her audience. The result is that listeners can find pieces of themselves in her relatable subject matter, words and melodies.

On her upcoming release Eyes On Us, recorded in July 2016 with producer/engineer Mitch Dane at his Sputnik Sound studio in Nashville, Gibson explores all of her themes with a confident vocal performance and genre-blending production.

"Eyes on Us" introduces the set of self-penned material with an upbeat vision of the excitement, frustration and uncertainty of an entrancing new relationship. The set continues with punchy tales of betrayal, rivalry and revenge ("I Heard"), late night confidences ("Truth and Myth") and rollicking good times, sisterhood and freedom ("My Best Friends"), followed by a ballad of fighting, and then succumbing to, the pull of things long gone ("Memories") and a candy-coated look at living and learning about young love ("Lovesick").

The set then takes a deeper turn with the use of a dark metaphor for a crumbling relationship (Cold War II"), a feverish tale of obsession and rejection ("Burning Red Hot"), a lonely and hypnotic cry of abandonment and need ("Ghost Town") and a distant call in the night, of plaintive, insistent, complex love ("Area Code"). The album closes with a charging anthem to a relationship that seems sweeter now that it’s gone ("When You Were Mine") and a lovely, haunting, lilting memory of a beautiful moment and place, suspended in time ("Faraway").

Gibson is a musical and lyrical thinker, as well as a fun-loving, upbeat, girl-next-door teenager. Both innocent and vulnerable, witty and wise, her songs touch the specifics of time, place and experience while retaining their relatable nature. They present Gibson’s rich and wide-ranging take on life as a teenaged girl in the 21st century.