From owner-mad-mission-news@smoe.org Sun Aug 15 00:35:12 2004 Received: from smoe.org (ident-user@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by smoe.org (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i7F4VNUt025282 for ; Sun, 15 Aug 2004 00:35:11 -0400 (EDT) Received: (from majordom@localhost) by smoe.org (8.12.10/8.12.10/Submit) id i7F4VMaH025277 for mad-mission-news-outgoing; Sun, 15 Aug 2004 00:31:22 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <200408150431.i7F4VMaH025277@smoe.org> X-Authentication-Warning: smoe.org: majordom set sender to owner-mad-mission-news@smoe.org using -f Date: Fri, 13 Aug 2004 22:33:30 -0700 To: mad-mission@smoe.org From: Matt Haven Subject: PattyG-News: Patty's Two-Page New York Times Article Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"; format=flowed X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 2.63 (2004-01-11) on jane.smoe.org X-Spam-Status: No, hits=0.0 required=5.0 tests=none autolearn=no version=2.63 X-Virus-Scanned: clamdscan / ClamAV version 0.60 X-Greylist: Sender IP whitelisted, not delayed by milter-greylist-1.5.2 (smoe.org [127.0.0.1]); Sun, 15 Aug 2004 00:35:11 -0400 (EDT) X-Greylist: Delayed for 00:06:40 by milter-greylist-1.5.2 (smoe.org [199.201.145.78]); Sat, 14 Aug 2004 01:40:12 -0400 (EDT) Sender: owner-mad-mission-news@smoe.org Precedence: bulk Patty is the star of a two-page article in Saturday's New York Times. From http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/14/arts/music/14GRIF.html ... AUSTIN, Tex. - Patty Griffin's loyalists need not squint at the credits to know that the Dixie Chicks rode to gold and glory singing songs that she wrote - "Top of the World," "Truth No. 2" and "Let Him Fly." They know that Bette Midler's pounding version of "Moses" is borrowed and that any Emmylou Harris CD is likely to include one of Ms. Griffin's songs. But longtime fans prefer Patty Griffin unmediated. They want that voice - sometimes regretful, sometimes rollicking - accompanied by a tentative piano or an acoustic guitar that she mastered only 10 years ago, one chord a week, while slinging pizza in Harvard Square. So a solo tour this spring filled auditoriums from Town Hall in Manhattan to the Fillmore in San Francisco. And on Aug. 18 Ms. Griffin is scheduled to appear in Central Park, midway through a national tour, along with her mentor Ms. Harris, Gillian Welch and others, who will alternate sets, swap instruments and sing backup for one other. Until recently, Ms. Griffin's lyrical and melodic gifts were a cultish secret. The artists who sang her songs, in styles as eclectic as her vintage wardrobe or her repertoire of laughs, were her staunchest fans. But now they are joined by growing numbers of record-buyers and concertgoers who not long ago barely knew her name. Ms. Griffin's latest CD, "Impossible Dream" (ATO Records), released in April, could sell 300,000 copies at its current pace by next July. That is nearly twice the sales of "1,000 Kisses," nominated for a Grammy in 2002, and about equal to Ms. Harris's most recent release, "Stumble Into Grace." Ms. Griffin, who is 40 and now based in Austin, came late to the stage and the recording studio; her career has been more a series of accidents than a well-wrought plan. She didn't own a guitar until she was 16 and even then she didn't learn to play it properly for years. A piano came much later, after she had already recorded two CD's. The singer's formal education ended with high school in a Maine mill town, where her father taught physics and her mother tended to seven children born in as many years. The house was too small for nine; the vegetable garden was a necessity. Her mother's days were filled with load after load of laundry and Mason jar after Mason jar of pickled beets. Her mother sang as she worked. Made-up songs. Hymns. Patsy Cline. "Ol' Man River." "Man of La Mancha." Ms. Griffin went home to Old Town, Me., while recording the latest of her four studio CD's. At the kitchen table she recorded her parents, now in their 70's, singing several bars of "The Impossible Dream." Their voices, private as a lullaby, are at the midpoint of the recording of the same name. "I understood when I was really little, making up songs with my mother and hearing her voice in the house, that music was wonderful and singing was something I loved more than anything else," said Ms. Griffin, who is slight, shy and has a tangle of red hair. "But we didn't know anyone who did it for a living, except maybe cover bands, at weddings." So from 1984, when she fled the cold for Florida with a girlfriend, until the mid-90's, when a guitar teacher in Massachusetts cajoled her onto a tiny stage with him, she worked at numbing jobs. In Delray Beach, wearing a hairnet she even today calls humiliating, Ms. Griffin waited on tables. In Cambridge, Mass., she spent a half-dozen years at the same Pizzeria Uno, until, she said, "I knew I'd kill somebody if I stayed another minute." Through it all, when asked what she did, she never put on airs. ` "I'm a waitress,' " she recalls answering. "I didn't see myself as someone who sings." But the dreary jobs, the last as a switchboard operator at Harvard, among women who talked of hard lives that bent but did not break them, "inspired the stories that came to be songs," Ms. Griffin said. Their stoic labor, and her own, were grist for "Making Pies," "Florida" and "Mother of God." The poems she started writing in high school and the music she played in her head were coming together. "I was getting glimpses of what it felt like to write something I wanted to sing," she said. "Sometimes it comes right out of your chest and reminds you that you're in there - you're not empty." Every song has a story, whether a season of unrelenting storms in her adopted hometown ("Rain") or the deathbed regrets of a relative ("Top of the World"). The bitter cold of a Maine winter and her mother's hymns to Mary recur again and again. A brief marriage became a virtual songbook of hard-won forgiveness. "Kite Song" was written to comfort her best friend and art director, Traci Goudie, who feared for a 19-year-old brother on the eve of the war in Iraq. "I worked myself into a frenzy as I often do," Ms. Goudie said. "And Patty calmed me down as she often does. And her calming me down turned into art." The genesis of the melodies she creates defies explanation, Ms. Griffin said. Sometimes a song fills her head, whole. Sometimes a few bars feel like a bridge and she attends to the gaps later. She never writes down the notes. "If it wants to be around, it sticks with you pretty fast," she said. She is more at ease on the guitar but alternates with the piano because it brings out different parts of her voice. "I sit down to play and see what happens," she said. "Usually sounds come out and they make themselves into shapes. It's like finding the sculpture in the rocks." Ms. Griffin stumbled into a record contract based on a self-made demo tape that she had planned to use only to get little gigs in Cambridge. She found herself in a New Orleans recording studio, with Ms. Harris eavesdropping as she finished "Wrecking Ball." There, 10 simple songs were turned into a lavishly produced CD that both she and the record company hated. Instead, under the title "Living With Ghosts" (A&M Records) they published the original tapes. Ms. Harris was now hiring Ms. Griffin for backup harmony and introducing others to her music. Ms. Griffin spent a miserable year in Nashville making a recording that never got released, but it included several songs that became title tracks for the Dixie Chicks. Radio play time and residuals from Chicks album sales remain her steadiest income. Nashville seemed to her too tough a town, she said, so she settled in Austin. She bought a two-family house in a funky neighborhood of students and artists, a modest but sassy place, confidently painted lime green with a red door and furnished with 1950's patio furniture, Chinese novelty lamps and objects found at yard sales. It even has a tenant, a Norwegian bass player, who mows the lawn when she is on the road. In the last year, Ms. Griffin has indulged a few fantasies: a professionally landscaped garden and a screened gazebo that she uses as a yoga studio. "I found my female pack here," Ms. Griffin said of her life in Austin. These women, all Southern, taught her that "might could" is a compound verb and that toothpaste soothes mosquito bites, she said. And they encouraged her shoe fetish. Greater fame, should it come, could disrupt all that, said Ms. Griffin, who strolls here unrecognized. She seems grateful for the fact that she is "just making a living," satisfied to be "mainly a word-of-mouth person." Should the glitter beckon, what would happen to the quiet she needs to compose and write? "This has worked for me so far," she said. "But who knows how long it can go on? I know what I value, what makes me happy. If I have the courage to remember that, I'll always have enough."