Her response was to get right back up on the horse that threw her. Says her longtime guitarist Doug Lancio, “When she got out of the deal with Interscope, she called everyone in the band and told them the news, but in that same conversation, she asked if I just wanted to make a record with her over here in my basement. I thought it was kind of brave of her.” Griffin arrived on his Nashville doorstep one Thursday in April, and by Saturday night they had finished a record, with Lancio co-producing.
The record they made, 1000 Kisses, was wall-to-wall ballads of loss and betrayal, with Griffin’s voice and guitar predominant. The songs were strewn with references that must have resonated from her recent experiences as much as any lost love from her past or her imagination. In “Rain”, she sings, “It’s hard to know when to give up the fight/The things you want that will never be right….But I’m still alive underneath this shroud.” On “Be Careful”, she cautions, “Be careful how you bend me/Be careful where you send me/Careful how you end me.”
Griffin included a Flaming Red outtake she’d been performing onstage, “Long Ride Home”, which eavesdrops on the thoughts of a man returning from his wife’s funeral. She stripped down “Makin’ Pies” from Silver Bell, the only song from the still-unreleased album that gets resurrected on 1000 Kisses. And, just because she could, she tossed in a couple of covers, which had been a no-no in her previous deal. She recorded her Springsteen favorite, “Stolen Car”, and an old standard, “Tomorrow Night”, which she had found on Bob Dylan’s Good As I Been To You.
Though Griffin says she was after the low-tech effect of a homemade record, the result was still quite different from the spare treatment of Living With Ghosts. She and Lancio enhanced the songs’ drama with gossamer layers of texture, and spare, if hardly minimal, accents and colors — Kami Lyle’s trumpet here, Michael Ramos’ accordion there, and subtle, processed studio effects throughout.
Some time after finishing the record and returning to Austin, Griffin got a call from Ramos. “He’s a producer as well as being an amazing keyboard player,” Griffin says. “He asked to produce a track for my record. I said ‘Well, Michael, it’s done, so I guess not.’ Then he said, ‘How about a Spanish language track?'” She positively cackles. “He knew that would get me, ‘cuz it’s just so out there he knew I’d have to do it!” Ramos persuaded her to record Emma Elena Valdelamar’s torchy bolero, “Mil Besos”. She liked the song so much, she translated it for the album’s title: 1000 Kisses.
If making the record hadn’t been enough, Griffin soon found perhaps an even more potent antidote to feeling sorry for herself. Following her tour with Concerts For A Landmine Free World, the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation had invited her to witness their work with landmine victims in Vietnam and Cambodia. In May 2001, she took them up on it.
Griffin was deeply moved by the work of volunteers who devoted long hours to helping amputees and other landmine victims. “Cambodia is completely devastated by landmines and they continue to be,” she says. “There are more landmines in the ground there than there are people living in Cambodia. You see amputees every minute on the street. Once they get in the ground, they keep the war going on until they’re all gone. I guess there are still landmines blowing up from World War II! If people were only aware they could get them all out of the ground and make sure they never happen again.”
After her experience in Cambodia, Griffin says, “In a certain way I felt like I needed to ground myself on a spiritual level.” She refocused on basics, surrounding herself with Austin artist friends in a community of creativity and mutual inspiration that she likens to “a quilting bee.” She’s fixing up her house and writing whatever songs she finds in her guitars. “I think that every guitar has different songs in it,” she says. “I don’t stick to one. I try to find ones that feel right and see what they have to say.” Lately, she’s also writing more songs on the piano. “That has a lot of different songs in it!” she says.
This spring and summer, she’ll be back on the road to support 1000 Kisses, courtesy of Dave Matthews’ designer imprint, ATO, which Matthews founded to give a label home to such quirky, compelling songwriters as David Gray, Chris Whitley and Griffin.
Looking back on her major-label experience, Griffin says, “I’m starting to feel free again. The funny thing was, honestly, I didn’t really know until I was off the label how confining it had been, and how choked I had been. A lot of the feedback that I was getting was that what I was doing was not marketable to the masses in their view, and that meant I wasn’t doing good work. But maybe it was good for somebody.
“I think it’s deadly for an artist to be that self-conscious about what they’re doing. You’re not gonna come up with what’s in your heart, really, and that is the most satisfying thing about creating. Period.”
ND contributing editor Linda Ray likes letters to the editor, but is aware that although Bob Dylan credits “Tomorrow Night” to Public Domain, it’s credited to Sam Coslow and Will Grosz on five Elvis records, one by Pat Boone and several by Big Joe Turner, among others. Sam Coslow also wrote “Cocktails For Two”. So there.
