When I tell you I’m falling
You tell me I’m strong
— “Blue Sky”
Patty’s mom and dad are not the only ardent supporters who show up on Impossible Dream. She engenders an enduring loyalty among her friends and colleagues, evidenced by the presence of producer Craig Ross, who played on the original full-band sessions for Griffin’s 1996 debut, Living With Ghosts, and produced half of Silver Bell. Guitarist Doug Lancio produced her 2001 Grammy-nominated disc, 1000 Kisses. Michael Ramos, who contributes trumpet to Impossible Dream, has been a confidante and sideman to Griffin since almost the beginning. They are drawn to her.
“I remember when I first met her [in 1995],” said Ramos. “We were in the studio and I’d ask her, ‘God, this is a great song! What’s this song about?’ And she would just kind of smile and shrug her shoulders. And I realized I wasn’t going to get any answers.
“Every once in awhile, I’d drive by her house to go have coffee, and she’d say, ‘I just finished a song, you wanna hear it?’ And I’d say, sure. And she’d sit down at the piano and play it for me. It made me a little smug. A Patty Griffin snob.”
That Griffin commands not only loyalty but also professional admiration is increasingly evident the more one talks to her circle of peers. Emmylou Harris, Buddy and Julie Miller, Shawn Colvin, Michael Fracasso, and a host of others contacted for this story formed a veritable Hallelujah Chorus on her behalf.
“I think she’s in a category by herself,” said Julie Miller. “There’s never a sense that she’s aware of how good she is….I just always loved how she would sound the exact same, as if she was singing by herself, even if she was recording or singing live. She’s lost completely in what she’s doing, and it just comes from the absolute center.”
Buddy Miller added, “She can sing the quietest phrase and have it really move you. And she’s also capable of being a loud, rocking soulful singer. On the Flaming Red tour, that band made great, wild, loud music. She was up there rocking.
“I play with a lot of different people, and when you ask them about a chord, they’ll say, oh, that’s an E chord, or that’s an F-sharp chord. Patty doesn’t know necessarily what the chords are to her songs, or how to describe them. She’s just all feeling.”
Of Griffin’s first album, Living With Ghosts, Shawn Colvin (whom Griffin joined on a women’s songwriters tour last fall) observed, “There were some really nasty songs on there and some really beautiful songs. Great stories. It was just all there: I was there, I trusted her, I went on that ride, I trusted that voice, and trusted the songs. I immediately wanted to hear those songs twice, then three times, then ten times. It doesn’t happen often, and the older I get, the less often it happens.”
Even before she started winning accolades from fellow artists and putting lyrics in the mouths of the Dixie Chicks (and Martina McBride, and Reba McEntire, and Emmylou Harris, and even — shazam! — Bette Midler), Griffin was carving out a body of work that won fierce adherents.
Diamonds, roses, I need Moses
To cross this sea of loneliness
— “Moses”
Those were the lines with which Griffin introduced herself to listeners on her first album, 1996’s acoustic demo-turned-debut Living With Ghosts, a song-cycle shot through with Catholic imagery and blue-collar class consciousness. Flaming Red, released two-years later, was a contentious, in-yo’-face rebuttal to the “folk singer” tag her first album had drawn.
After disagreements with her record company and an album (Silver Bell) that was never released, Griffin seemingly reconciled the disparate parts of her musical personality with the Grammy-nominated and critically-lauded 1000 Kisses in 2002. Its companion piece, the live album/DVD package A Kiss In Time, was released last fall.
Griffin grew up the youngest of seven siblings who shared, besides the family’s auburn tresses, an apparently ferocious work ethic. Today, her brothers and sisters are variously embarked on careers as teachers, lawyers, actuaries and engineers.
On the other hand, when Griffin was in her mid-20s in the late 1980s, a four-year marriage was heading for the rocks and she was slinging slices of pizza at a joint called Pizzeria Uno in Harvard Square, while making fledgling flights at playing guitar and crafting lyrics.
“There was a point in my 20s when I heard something like, ‘Well, I wonder when you’re going to give this idea up,'” Griffin said, recalling her parents’ periodic concerns (but also citing their enduring support for her choices).
“My parents grew up in the Depression,” she explained, as a waitress placed a platter of vegetarian chorizo, black beans and papas fritas before her. “And they didn’t want to see me be poor. And they were right about that,” she added with a bark of laughter, “I was poor! I was real poor for a real long time.
“If it wasn’t for credit cards, I don’t know what I would have done. I did the credit card dance for a good long while. I remember putting something like 50 dollars worth of groceries on my credit card and just shaking — ‘I can’t afford this!'” It’s not hard to imagine such circumstances influencing Griffin songs such as “Poor Man’s House” and “Making Pies”.
But the thought of returning to a day job doesn’t necessarily frighten her even today. “I feel like that would be OK if it had to happen,” she said. “You can’t live through years of hand-to-mouth and not feel like it could come again, and you want to be prepared for it.”
A self-described “shy person,” Griffin for a long time doubted whether she could ever come up to scratch and actually face an audience. It wasn’t as though there was a lack of inspiration. Music permeated the air around her in her Boston days. Bands such as Treat Her Right, Morphine and the Immortals populated area clubs. And there was plenty of historical precedent for a girl with a guitar in Cambridge; alumni of the rich and resonant folk music scene had over the years included Bonnie Raitt, Tom Rush, Joan Baez, Jim Kweskin, Taj Mahal, Tracy Chapman, and a host of others.
