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“It’s a Mad Mission” – THE SMALL BEAUTIES IN THE SONGS OF PATTY GRIFFIN’S “Impossible Dream”.

Patty Griffin’s music is a small pleasure, especially for those with their own secret sorrow, real or imagined (and which could be most of us). I suppose you have to mature into secret sorrows, so it is not music for chart people. But also, perhaps everybody’s favourite artist appeals to something secret in the music, which appeals to the coterie of true believers. Quite what Michael Jackson, or Cheryl Cole, say to their coterie of admirers I know not really, but there is a lasting appeal in there somewhere.
Perhaps this is really about what is that appeal. That makes you want to have that music playing all the time. I had that with “Little Love Affairs” by Nanci Griffith once, but not lately.
I was beginning to think that I would never find such an album, never mind such music, again. It was Nanci’s songs that struck me though, on that album, the completeness of it. I got a similar feeling from her “The Last of the True Believers” as well, come to think of it.
But there is an added complexity to Patty’s music that is difficult to describe, though you can only try.
Patty Griffin is a much more familiar figure in America. In 2004 both “Paste” and “No Depression” magazines wrote major feature articles on her on the eve of the release of this, her fifth album. Nothing appeared in the British music press, but I read these on an Easter family holiday on the Isle of Mull, far away from Amazon, or any record shop that might stock these.
As her album before (“A Kiss In Time” –superb musicianship from Buddy and Julie Miller) was a live album this is her 4th official release. Too, there is a ‘lost’ album, adding mystery to her canon and there is a rumour of ‘One Big Loss’ in her life, which fuels the range of melancholic landscapes she sets to music.
Patti supposedly has/had a secret sorrow, a husband that went sour and left, the one she carries a torch for, and that perhaps after all the time in between he really was the one. All her songs, the rumour went, are a way of recreating, not him, that would be too easy, too obvious, but the feeling, of being lost, left, betrayed. The emotions you stew in.
To call her merely a ‘singer songwriter’, or a ‘folkie’, is to miss the hidden depths that the music offers on repeated listenings. She is possessed of a huge singing range, and an ability to hold and bend the notes as the music caresses around her vocal performance.
There is a certain sparseness to the arrangements, on this album, as on her first more particularly, an album of demos called “Living With Ghosts”. However, the next, “Flaming Red”, was a full tilt rock album (a lot of which turns up on “A Kiss in Time” with different arrangements).
The lush orchestration of the title track, “Mil Besos”, on her third album “1000 Kisses”, descries a range of musical visions, and this album, of quiet songs about baking, is perhaps her most immediately accessible.
And what an oeuvre she is beginning to produce, of some wonderful songs, paid the compliment of being covered by other performers – The Dixie Chicks “Top of the World Tour” live album is named after one of her songs (Patti’s version of which appears here – just her on acoustic guitar, JD Foster on bass, and Lisa Germano on violin); and also covering “Truth Number 2” on it.
Emmylou Harris used “One Big Love” on “Red Dirt Girl” (being a particular fan of Patty’s, describing her music as being “fully formed” from the beginning).

One of her songs begins, “Occurred to me the other day, you’ve been gone a couple of years”, and that reaches to the heart of it, to and of people who had an emotional investment in someone else, and they upped and left, for reasons of their own, and they could never adequately express to you.
Of how such feelings don’t just die, don’t just disappear. They even ‘mature’, over time; how it takes years to, if not be ‘over’ somebody exactly, to be reconciled to it in your way, and find a modus to keep going on.
But those feelings have left such deep deposits in your emotional field that they colour your perception of the world. Not even that you want them back, just that you want to find a peace in the upheaval they brought you. You probably only wanted to get back once, but you go on, and there are other people, and you make accommodations with them, and go on in a different way.
The American mythology, of ‘if you can’t make it go right, at least you can go’ is part of this; that you keep moving on. The ‘highway’ metaphor is part of this reconciliation. Life is an endless highway, if you can’t make it where you are get on a bus to nowhere and start again. The movie will catch up with you five years later, and revisit your disappointments, your small town roots in a new setting, the person you are in the process of ‘becoming’.
Though Patti seems to belie this, in that you may have already ‘become’, as above, that your reconciliations are to you, yourself, to you as you are.
Your ‘becoming’ is a reconciliation to you as you have always been. Living is about achieving an internal piece, to find the strength to get up each day and do the things you have to do. Bruce Springsteen territory too, and it may be no accident, the why she covers his ‘Stolen Car’ on “1000 Kisses” album.
The place that you come from features in there. “Something as simple as boys and girls”, the melismatic piano, you are sitting in your living room thinking not about where you are going, but where you have been, a necessary process in the flow of linear time. Life here is a series of punctuated moments, you are not changing into someone else after all, you are just making better accommodations to the person you became by the time you were 18.
Personal growth is not so much about developing hidden aspects of your ‘potential’, as finding happiness about where you have been, searching for moments of ‘flow’, as you know that this is what there is, there is no one else, just this person you are, sitting there, in a leather armchair, deciding which of the day’s chores have to be done next.

“The Impossible Dream” by Patty Griffin
ATO Records [ATO0017 88088-21520-2]

“The Impossible Dream” maintains sufficient differentiation from her earlier output to develop her musical style, and even widen it in some areas.
There is a general sense of loss across it, of a life and a love, where to go now. Of a home that no longer exists and has not yet been replaced, the affliction of someone wondering how to spend the next 40 years, and how they got to where they are.
Musically the overall backing to the songs are sparse but the standout, and perhaps key song, is “Useless Desires”, a rolling waterfall of words and music dedicated to the town you once lived in and have been glad to leave, though you paid a price when the joy of living was replaced by just living:
“I take a bitter pill, it gets me on my way, for the little aches and pains, the ones I have from day to day, to help me think a little less about the things I miss, to help me not to wonder how I ended up like this”.
“When It Don’t Come Easy” is also a fuller band arrangement, supporting The Voice, rather than upstaging it. Michael Ramos on trumpet, and Ian McLagan on piano are particularly outstanding.
“Standing” is the other song that sets itself apart, a gospel song, spare organ work and Doug Lancio’s Pop Staples guitar work backing up the churchy vocals:
“standing in the shadow of the hill…. standing in the shadow walking blind”.
The rest of the songs create a sombre mood, for a quiet Sunday afternoon, which reminds me, though there is no other similarity, of the one created by the second side of Van Morrison’s “Veedon Fleece”.
Patty’s piano work is particularly beautiful, on “The Kite Song”:
“In the middle of the night, we keep sending little kites, until a light gets through”;
and on ‘Mother of God’, a 7.07 musical landscape that sucks you into the overall vision, of what you once did, and how you can go on from here.
“Florida” is the alter ego of this song. “Mother of God” is first person, while this one is about those younger ones who have followed the same journey, desperate to make the same mistakes. This one sounds like a fuller arrangement of the songs on “Living With Ghosts”.
“Love Throw a Line” has a Tom Waits style percussion driving it along;
“Just before the flood comes, just before the night falls, just before the blood runs, into the valley”, while “Rowing Song” also has such echoes, in the sparse trumpet and tuba underlying the melody.
“Icicles” ends the album. Now it is winter and:
“I must confess there appears to be, way more darkness than light, I want to fall like a pearl, to the bottom of the sea, where no one will find us tonight”.
These songs generally go way beyond verse and chorus, the lyrical content on a par with The Higher Songwriters over the years. These are probably her most intimate collection of songs, but it is early yet to close the book on what she might produce next.
It is a shame that she is not better known here but when this music does call you it certainly strikes hard. Her back catalogue is more than worth exploring. “A Kiss in Time” is a good companion to this album, a compendium of her earlier work. She has released “Children Running Through” since, and is about to release “Downtown Church” in early 2010. Delay no more. If you are intrigued get involved, and buy up this fine, fine music.

by Neil MacAlpine,