In 1999, Griffin and Joyce began working on her first PolyGram release, Silver Bell. They returned to Kingsway in New Orleans and started laying down tracks that showed Griffin’s songwriting range to be far broader, both lyrically and melodically, than either of her previous releases. “My whole thing was,” she says, “okay, Britney Spears is on the radio. There’s really not a better time to kind of experiment sonically and do some stuff that’s a little more grown-up, more hard-core emotionally.”
Silver Bell also revealed an evolution in her personal development. The songs on Living With Ghosts had shown open wounds from her broken marriage. Those were still evident on Flaming Red, but they were healing with time and perspective, and the girl was bursting to discover a new life, even likening herself to the devilishly peripatetic character in Hans Christian Andersen’s Red Shoes. On Silver Bell, however, she subtly shifted her focus beyond herself, even to social commentary and thoughts of a higher power. The music still rocked, in some spots even harder than on Flaming Red; but there were also softer, acoustic tunes, and hints of hip-hop and Latin flavors.
When Griffin delivered Silver Bell to Interscope in the summer of 2000, company president Tom Wally told Griffin he liked it, he thought it was a quality record and he wanted to put it out, but…he didn’t hear a single. Griffin thought she did. “I mean, I don’t know what singles are,” she says. “I just hear catchy tunes and I go, ‘Okay, well, I’ve got a single.’ But apparently they hear things differently.
“Then the quest for the single came. We tried to come up with songs that were singles.” She could at least take her time; Wally had also said that, so as not to get lost in the flood of bigger releases planned for holiday sales, the release should wait until early 2001. That delay, however, made it impossible to capitalize on Griffin’s back-to-back fall 2000 tours with the Dixie Chicks and Emmylou Harris. Worse, as things turned out, Interscope was sold, and Wally left for another label.
In February 2001, the new regime flew Griffin to Los Angeles and put her up at the Four Seasons Hotel. She wouldn’t get such royal treatment if they intended to drop her, right? She had some doubts. By that time, she says, Silver Bell “was a massive, huge record and full of compromises, full of songs that I felt like were really not cutting it quality-wise, but they were what the people from the label [had] thought were good singles, so they stayed on the record. And that’s the kind of thing that starts to happen when you’re on a label and people are really worried about money.” Indeed, those expense account lunches, let alone Four Seasons bills, do add up.
That she can now laugh about the ensuing meeting shows how much Griffin has grown. “They said, ‘Patty, we don’t like this record, and as a matter of fact, we don’t think you’ve really ever made a great record, so we would like to help you make another record.’ They pointed out a song that I had pitched for a single and they said, ‘We need about ten more of these, and we’ll put a record out for you.’
“There were three guys and I think that they really were trying. On the way out the door they handed me a record by U2, ‘Beautiful Day’, which isn’t a bad record, it’s just — I remember War. I was a kid when War came out, and I’d never heard anything like it before. And I thought that ‘Beautiful Day’ was a long way off from anything I wanted to do musically.”
Griffin went home and tried for a week to write singles. She even listened to U2’s album, but she says, “One day when I put it in, I just felt really sad after a couple of songs. I felt as though the record is beautiful, but it’s cold, and everything on the radio, even if it is beautiful, right now, is cold. There are definitely exceptions to that, but generally speaking, that is where the radio leaves me, is cold.
“I took it out and decided not to listen to it, and a few hours later I got a call from my manager. He asked me if I wanted to get off Interscope.”
She wonders, now, if all along she wasn’t being “mercy-killed.” Griffin would lose Silver Bell in the deal, but the label wouldn’t hold her to her debt, which she says was “massive.” And she would be free. “First thing I did was go outside and jump up and down in my yard,” she says. “I was really, really, really, really happy.
“And then a couple days later I just went ‘HEY! They can’t just let me go like that. I’m good!’ All this shit came up, you know — rejection, and nobody fought for me.”
