Never satisfied with the status quo, Tracie will graduate from the University of North Texas with a Bachelor of Arts in Music (and a minor in Spanish, no less) in January 2010. Tracie continues to tour and promote her popular 2002 release, That’s Mine. Besides studying formal music composition, piano, violin and guitar, she has recently taken up the mandolin. Expect a new CD release from her soon with all-new songs. A recording of her instrumental compositions is in the works as well.
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“Tracie has one of those rare and distinctive voices that makes people stop what they are doing and pay attention.” – Abby Goldstein
“Tracie Merchant. Her name alone sounds like someone who's sold millions of records.” – Josh Alan
“The first time I heard Tracie perform, I knew that her music and my film belonged together. It was as if the film had been waiting for Tracie’s sound.”– Kevin Nash
North Texas e-News calls Tracie "Entertaining...[with a] potent voice."
Beanstock.org, 2003 – Performer, Music Booking, Stage Manager
3rd Annual DallasMusic.com Awards – online voters named her “Female Vocalist of the Year", February of 2002. (If you surf there now, the old site is gone.)
1998 and 1999, finalist for Lillith Fair Talent Search, Dallas live show auditions
Performed notable venues in Texas like Poor David’s Pub, Club Dada, Casbeers, Anderson Fair, the Deep Ellum Arts Festival, Uncle Calvin’s Coffee House, Mother Eagan’s…along with the respected Woody Guthrie Folk Festival in Okemah, OK. Shared a stage with Teri Hendrix, Lloyd Maines, Adam Carroll, Guy Forsyth, Ruthie Foster, Tom Prasado-Rao, Carrie Cooper, Ken Gains, and Butch Morgan…opened shows for headliners like Betty Lavette to Trout Fishing in America.
Two of Tracie’s songs are showcased in Air an independent, half-length film. “Free” accompanies the movie's opening sequence and “Independence Day” bookends the film during the credits. Air has been featured at several film festivals, independent outlets, and PBS. www.airthemovie.com
The Ackermans recorded “Independence Day” on their Code of the West CD. It’s featured twice...one version with a French chorus for the Ackerman’s annual European tour.
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With deep roots in the rural Texas-Oklahoma Panhandles, Tracie Merchant grew up in suburban Dallas. A family full of farmers, accountants, teachers, and insurance salesmen, they assumed it was a childhood whim when she began to bug her mother about piano lessons. Her grandmother knew enough piano to give her her first lessons, and Tracie also convinced them that she needed violin lessons too. But they should not have been so surprised at her interest in music. Tracie was an only child and spent hour upon uninterrupted hour with the likes of Elvis, Marty Robbins, Jonny Mathis, the Rolling Stones, Andy Williams, the Beach Boys, Peter Paul and Mary, the Beatles, the Smother’s Brothers, soundtracks from West Side Story and the Sound of Music, as well as standard Classical works, all from her family's record collections. Her grandparent’s danced in the living room to the Lawrence Welk Show, and she sang hymns in church every Sunday and Christmas. The introduction of songwriters like Susan Vega, Tracy Chapman, Edie Brickel, and Cindy Lauper to her radio peaked her curiosity into the songs themselves. At age 14 she first met the dynamic, performing songwriter Karl Anthony (now of California) and realized that she wanted to play her own music too. She wrote her first song at 17.
College came quickly after that, and Tracie put away the idea of being onstage with a guitar and a song to study classical violin and formal music composition at the University of North Texas. Not completely unsatisfied, but not completely happy with herself either, Tracie uncharacteristically dropped everything, and began to write songs. She had to get on stage. She picked up the guitar and practiced and wrote furiously so that she could make it happen.
Tracie played every open-mike and dive bar that would let her on stage and luckily met Bob and Sally Ackerman (husband/wife duo of Dallas) and Jack Hardy (of New York) who encouraged her to keep writing, Bill Nash (of Dallas) who introduced her to the world of folk music through the Kerrville Folk Festival and Rocky Mountain Song School, and David Card, owner of Poor David’s Pub, who let her sneak in (He pretended he didn’t know.) and watch national touring acts at his club.
Gigging in Dallas and around Texas, with a few trips to New York, people began to ask to buy music. After she was a finalist several years running in the B.W. Stevenson Songwriting Competition and won DallasMusic’com’s Female Vocalist of the Year, she decided it was time.
She launched her first CD project, That's Mine, on her own label, 225 Miles Music. Self-produced (engineered by Carlos Flood), her debut opus features ten original songs...all acoustic, live studio cuts,: simply voice, guitar, and soul. Two songs were co-written with Dallas based, South Texas born Darryl Lee Rush.
This heartfelt recording is simply a taste of her talent. Through her musical journey she is discovering herself and her life's work...but you have to experience the passionate and soulful performance of Tracie Merchant. Continuing to explore her own voice, Tracie's passion has led her to put all else aside for a dream. "I see singing, playing, and writing as something that I'm supposed to be doing", she explains. "I don't really know why. My life was good, but I was never really happy until I gave in to something deep inside of me. It was something I had to do for myself. This 'thing' I choose to do – the most illogical choice for a career as far as I'm concerned – the best decision I ever made. I see so many people living a life they really don't enjoy. Somehow I just got to a place where I didn't want to live with regrets. I realized I was going to have to follow my heart – I didn't really know where that would take me, but I wanted to find out.” She is quite ambitious, but likes an uncomplicated life. “Life is simpler when you live what you love,” she says. If you listen, you can hear her message, and it will take you along for a ride.
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