Patty Griffin Sings
Thinking that Patty Griffin should get more serious about singing is like suggesting to Buddy Rich that he ought to practice drums a little more diligently. Yet after weathering maybe a few too many nights on the road, doing songs that left her feeling less than fulfilled, that’s exactly what Griffin decided she needed to do.
Griffin s crown has always borne two jewels: her voice, one of the most distinctive on record, and her writing, each complementing the other. Yet on her new release, Children Running Through, her vocals are the focus as her writing scales down, sometimes to the point of feeling more improvisational than preconceived. To those who appreciate the spare eloquence of her character studies (“Tony, Christina” and “Mary,” from Flaming Red) and the dark beauty of her story-songs (“Florida” and “Top of the World,” from Impossible Dream), an uncomfortable first impression is that for all of the luster of its sound, something in this music is out of balance.
That’s clear from the opening seconds of track one, “You’ll Remember,” which teams Griffin with acoustic bassist Glenn Worf and some barely audible, brush-stroked drums. In just over two minutes, she expresses a message that doesn’t go that far beyond the title, though her delivery invests the lyric with several shades of implicit meaning. With this performance, the bare bones of the instrumental track and the skeletal lyric, are all she needs.
It gets even more basic than this, especially in songs that boil down to little more than an expression of emotion. “Getting Ready,” for instance, driven by an exuberant, churning, up-tempo guitar strum, more or less announces how great it feels to dump some loser who’s caused nothing but problems in her life. And “I Don’t Ever Give Up” says, again, pretty much what the title forecasts, namely that Patty Griffin doesn’t give up, though this time her assertions ride the momentum of John Painter’s emphatic string arrangement.
It’s difficult to imagine some of these songs holding up to the best in Griffin’s catalog; on the other hand, her singing stands more on its own than most of what she’s done since she cut her first album, Living with Ghosts, at Kingsway Studios in New Orleans as a solo, voice-andguitar demo. For all that she’s accomplished since then, that early effort does have a unique purity, which Griffin seems to pursue—and attain—on Children Running Through.
“The thing is, over these past two years I wasn’t enjoying some of the songs I’d written—and no,” she teases, laughing, “I’m not going to name any names. But I’d get out onstage and as I was singing I’d be thinking, ‘Man, I wish that note was two steps higher and eight seconds longer.’ I really wanted to have some songs that I could really enjoy singing.”
Inspiration presented itself in the form of some old records that Griffin dusted off and revisited. “I started spending a lot of time listening to the old crooners just sit on a note …and sing it loud! I began thinking about how you can be impressed by people who are great at writing songs while at the same time thinking that they aren’t really that great as singers. The more I thought about that, the more I started coming back to where I’d started, as far as writing songs that I could really let myself sing.”
By “old crooners,” just to clarify, Griffin means singers like Sam Cooke, whose sound was instrumental in her process of working toward Children Running Through. “I’d listen to things like ‘A Change Is Gonna Come,” which is hardly the most complex Sam Cooke lyric, but there’s a lot of room in it. He doesn’t try to cram everything he wants to say into it. He just picks a couple of words and sings them with emotion. That’s a good lesson in how to write as well as sing a song.”
It was a lesson she pondered even in the middle of her concerts, at least when not thinking about how she might have recast this melody or stretch out that phrase. “I’d be up there in front of the audience, thinking, ‘Man, I’ve got so many stories to tell.’ I was wishing I had something I could sing that people could dance to—songs that could carry them away—rather than songs that just told a story in a very specific way. That’s when I began thinking that if I could be a little less clever about the writing, I might be looser and more able to do what I wanted to do onstage.”
And so when she began writing the material that would wind up on Children Running Through, Griffin allowed herself to revert back to how she felt about making music for the first time—further back than Living with Ghosts, all the way to when she was a young girl in Old Town, not far from the Canadian border in Maine. Music, especially singing, was intrinsic to the passage of days and nights with her parents, grandparents, and six siblings. As the youngest child, Patty absorbed what she heard and learned how to feed it back through whatever holes lingered in the family harmony.
“And I used to put on records, like Linda Ronstadt’s Greatest Hits, Volume One, and let ‘em rip,” she remembers. “That’s how I started singing—really loud, even though I didn’t have the kind of body to sing like that. The thing is that, being a kid, I wasn’t at all selfconscious about getting up in front of people and singing loud. I just loved to sing. So as I was writing for this record, I tried to enjoy singing in that same way, with whatever I came up with.”
This didn’t mean that Griffin abandoned completely the narrative side of her writing. But when she does allow herself to tell a story on Children Running Through, her priorities remain evident: simplicity and the pleasure of performance are her most important goals. So it is on “Burgundy Shoes,” which fits into her catalog of story-songs yet focuses more on one golden moment than any flow of impressions or events.
“A couple of years ago somebody asked me why I was such a sad songwriter—so I decided to write something happy,” she says, smiling at the obviousness of the idea. “This was at least six months or even a year before I started writing the rest of this record, so it was the beginning of my ‘happy-song’ phase. I wrote it from the perspective of a three-or four-year-old child who is just so happy to see the sun coming in through the window of her bus.”
That image, intact through all these years, translates on “Burgundy Shoes” into the purest evocation of innocence in Griffin’s discography: a chant of just one word, “Sun! Sun! Sun!,” that in its elemental eloquence conveys a kind of joy, uncomplicated and uncompromised, that for too many adults is within reach only through memory.
“It was one of those perfect moments that last for about ten minutes,” Griffin says, “when you’re sitting with your mom or somebody really cool, even though there’s nothing special going on. Those are the moments you hold in your heart; they’re the greatest moments, really, of your life.”
To help her capture the ephemeral qualities she wanted for Children Running Through, Griffin asked Mike McCarthy to join her as co-producer. Though studio-seasoned, with credits including projects with Spoon, Lee Ann Womack, and …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, he had never worked with Griffin. For Griffin, though, this was all the more reason to bring him onboard, so that she could record her voice with the same freedom she had brought to writing for it.
“One thing I’ve discovered over the years is that my singing is getting more and more airy,” she says. “This means it gets sucked up by added instrumentation. That’s why a lot of people prefer hearing me with a sound that’s stripped down. But even if I’m just playing guitar while I’m singing, I usually hit it pretty loud, so it bleeds into the vocal. The challenge for Mike was to record me so that everything pops.”
Through extensive pre-production, which centered on an unusually thorough search for exactly the right vocal and instrumental mics, McCarthy and Griffin empowered Children Running Through to snap, crackle, and pop. Those details that you expect from a Patty Griffin album are all in place, from the gauzy/dreamy piano ballads (“Burgundy Shoes,” “Someone Else’s Tomorrow”) to the Emmylou Harris duet (“Trapeze”). But the differences are unmistakable too, and with them the evidence of Griffin’s willingness to step backward now and then, if that’s what it takes to keep from standing still. .
Patty Griffin's latest CD, Children Running Through, comes out February 6.
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