From: owner-mad-mission-digest@smoe.org (mad-mission-digest) To: mad-mission-digest@smoe.org Subject: mad-mission-digest V8 #118 Reply-To: mad-mission@smoe.org Sender: owner-mad-mission-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-mad-mission-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk * If you ever wish to unsubscribe, send an email to * mad-mission-digest-request@smoe.org * with ONLY the word unsubscribe in the body of the email * . * For the latest information on Patty's tour dates, go to: * http://www.pattygriffin.net/PattyInConcertDB.php * OR * go to http://www.atorecords.com * . * PLEASE :) when you reply to this digest to send a post TO the list, * change the subject to reflect what your post is about. A subject * of Re: mad-mission-digest V8 #___ gives readers no clue * as to what your message is about. * Also, PLEASE do not quote an entire digest when you reply to the * list. Edit out anything you are not referring to. mad-mission-digest Wednesday, May 12 2004 Volume 08 : Number 118 Today's Subjects: ----------------- Re: MM: Chicago Show ["Sandi Campbell" ] Re: MM: Chicago Show ["Sandi Campbell" ] MM: Boston show [sarah martin ] MM: HoustonChronicle - Singers inspired by Emmylou Harris [PinkChanel@aol] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 13:03:00 -0000 From: "Sandi Campbell" Subject: Re: MM: Chicago Show We have decided to go to eat at Pizza Capri, right down the street. Expecting to get there around 5ish. Nothing formal, just need to eat. But anyone interested is welcome to join us! - -Sandi Chris Murphy said: > Hi Everyone, > Are any of you getting together before the Vic Show in Chicago on Saturday? > > ________________________________ > - -- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 14:08:16 -0000 From: "Sandi Campbell" Subject: Re: MM: Chicago Show OK, How about this. If anyone is interested in joining us pre-show in Chicago at Pizza Capri, please e-mail me off-list. This way, if necessary, I can make a reservation. Later! Chris Murphy said: > Hi Everyone, > Are any of you getting together before the Vic Show in Chicago on Saturday? > > ________________________________ > - -- ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 07:17:05 -0700 (PDT) From: sarah martin Subject: MM: Boston show I know some of you don't check the discussion boards on the website...so here's what I posted last night after getting back from Boston. Hi guys- gosh...what a crazy 24 hour period this has been. Crazy in a good way though of course. The posts so far have gotten the point across that it was an unforgetable show. She's truely amazing. One person in my group hadn't seen Patty live before and wasn't super familiar with the music. After the show we asked him what he thought and he said "two thumbs up and if I had more thumbs, they'd be up." She rocked and the band was smokin. Ok...I know all of you at the restaurant will want a blow by blow of the after show festivities. I was thinking on the way home about whether I should post the minute by minute details or just post a general type thing and leave it at that. As much as I'm tempted to keep this very cool night to myself...I know that if it was one of you I'd TOTALLY want you to tell us about it. Plus, everyone at dinner was so excited for me...how could I hold back! This will be long...beware. I've never been one to be brief when telling a story. I don't really know where to start...ok, so we (my friend Angela came with me) go over to the backstage door and the guy says, "are you with the family?" and we of course say "no, but we have passes can we still go?" He's puzzled and not sure what to do so he just lets us go. So we follow the crowd down to this room and literally it's like a Griffin family reunion. She had parents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews etc. there. Roy Taylor made a funny comment when the children were swarming the food table, "oh, now that they've seen this they're all going to want to be rock stars." Patty's dogs were down there too- Bean and La Dee...not sure how to spell that, but as in la dee da. If you've seen the kiss in time dvd...those are the dogs. SO stinkin cute. We spent a fair amount of time giving the dogs attention, not like they didn't already have enough though. Patty was greeting all of the family so we hung back and talked to Doug and some of the other band members for a while. They're all just so down to earth and cool. Doug totally took us under his wing and made sure we met everyone and made sure Patty knew we were there. We talked to him about all sorts of stuff...about doing 1000 kisses in his basement, about the website discussion boards- since he recently checked them out and how he came to work with Patty. Someone on one of the posts mentioned that they were surprised to see him on stage in a suitish type outfit...FYI, that's because he was out of clean laundry. I know those are the days that I show up to work in a really nice outfit too. It just so happened to work out that his suit matched the coloring of Patty's outfit though so it worked. Oh- and someone on a post about NYC mentioned that Patty said something about Saki. Doug told us a little story about the NYC saki fun they had, so they were all dragging a bit after the big NYC weekend. Roy came over and chatted with us too... really nice guy. He is Patty's sound guy and frequents the message boards as most of you know. We told him that it was an amazing show and he said he thought it was definitely the best yet on the tour. I thought the sound was stellar. We talked to one of Patty's sisters since she lives a few streets away from me. She looks so familiar to me and we figured out a few reasons that might be. So it'll be interesting to see if I bump into her around town now that we've introduced ourselves to each other. She was really nice to us. Everyone was really. So, the family started clearing out and Doug went over and told her that Sarah and Angela were here and we'd won "murph's contest". I'd met her at Tower a couple of weeks ago so she turned around, got all excited, said "from Portland Maine" and came over and gave me a nice hug. She's too cute. We of course complimented her on the fantastic show. Here's where all of you that wanted me to ask all kinds of questions about her music and specific songs will be disappointed. We talked about everything but that, literally. Somehow the topic of needing to do laundry came up again, apparently this is a big concern. It was funny because they were all talking about how they needed to get in line when they got to the Birchmere. Patty jokingly asked if she got to go first. Some of the guys were contemplating spending their day off on Monday at a laundry mat in boston. We talked about the dogs, her outfit- which I TOTALLY loved, her family that was there, cycling, the japanese symbols on our necklaces that were supposed to mean happiness..which we joked could have said, "hi, I'm stupid" for all we knew. There's lots more, but it's all just silly stuff...whatever came up really. She was really easy to talk to and the best part is the she listens so intently. She signed some stuff for us and we took some pictures. We got Bean in a few too. Hopefully they'll come out...I'll show you if they do. I gave her the blue notebook and she LOVED it. I wish all of you could have seen her surprised/happy reaction. She thought it was really nice. I told her it would be a little reading for the tour bus today, since she said it would be an 8hr ride to Alexandria, VA. We joked about what a mystery the contents were since it was passed around at dinner, thrown in my bag, and not touched until it went into patty's hands. I assured her that I was sure it was all very sweet. I can't imagine anything less from this group. Then we wrapped it up and basically she said thank you again for the birthday drive and I said thank you for letting us invade your family reunion. I think it was between 11:30 and 12:00 before we left there. Oh...and they ALL had great things to say about our Murph. So I know how lucky I was to win the passes and I'm totally grateful, but guess what else happened... We left our hotel this morning to go get breakfast and we're walking down the street talking up a storm about last night and guess who we run into (almost literally) when we were going around a corner. Yup, Patty. She was walking her dogs. It was just really funny for us because we were talking about her when we ran into her. Good stuff of course. We told her we were talking about her too...she probably heard anyway...but we all laughed and moved on pretty quickly. Even walking the dogs first thing in the morning, she looked totally cute, she had the best red jacket on. ok, are you asleep yet...I'll stop. It was a great night in Boston and I'm back in Maine totally exausted now. Nap time! Angela, feel free to chime in about all of this...I'm sure I forgot something! It was great meeting all of you! Sarah Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 11 May 2004 17:13:48 EDT From: PinkChanel@aol.com Subject: MM: HoustonChronicle - Singers inspired by Emmylou Harris May 10, 2004, 2:48PM Young singers find inspiration in voice of Emmylou Harris By TOM MOON (Knight Ridder) Hang around popular music long enough and, if you're making a unique contribution, eventually there come followers -- younger artists who derive some crucial inspiration from a recording sitting in some dusty corner of the catalog. Associated Press Emmylou Harris shows off her WHY Award to Lou Reed, left, and Tom Chapin at the World Hunger Year Chapin Awards ceremony, May 3, in New York. This happens most often with songwriters -- the trailblazing and now-canonic works of Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell have fueled boatloads of song-poet aspirations. Right now, in a curious twist, a whole brood of young female singer-songwriters -- among them Patty Griffin, Sarah Harmer and Mindy Smith -- are grappling with the long shadow of Emmylou Harris, the countrypolitan icon who, for much of her career, has been revered more for her interpretations than her original compositions. Harris began recording in the mid-1970s -- four of her important early records have just been reissued, in expanded form, by Rhino -- as the protege of Gram Parsons, the late purveyor of "cosmic American music." Her initial collections, which include songs by the Beatles and Merle Haggard, display a healthy disregard for country convention -- and an equal skepticism about the sweetening then beginning to infect singer-songwriter pop. Though she wasn't actively rebelling against either camp, Harris came up with something that endures, still, as its own universe: an approach to singing that could be as idealistic as that of Neil Young and other California singer-songwriters she sometimes collaborated with, and at the same time as wry and knowing as the Nashville old-timers. Her works, though, emphasized earthiness; they were less showy, less about dazzling listeners than about catching them off guard in a quiet moment. Harris' primary weapon has been her voice, an instrument of crystalline purity and devastating directness. Without getting much above a whisper, she could shape a plain melody into an appeal for redemption, or coax something almost celestial from a dusty tale of loss. As she evolved and her confidence grew, she tested those angelic qualities in different kinds of music -- she sang quiet gospel hymns and stompy country rock and mournful bluegrass, and later, on 1995's Wrecking Ball and her most recent Stumble Into Grace, from last year, she concocted hypnotic, delicately spiritual introspections. Harris has left bread crumbs virtually everywhere, and over the last few years younger talents in the alternative-country realm and beyond have begun to appreciate, if not actively study, them. Influence can be impossibly tricky to pin down, and because Harris' stylistic refinements have been swirling around for so long, they sometimes turn up in trace amounts, in the small things. The uprooted, tossed-by-the-wind feeling Harris caught on Luxury Liner, in 1977, and perfected on Wrecking Ball blows through the ethereal prayers of a Seattle band called Jesse Sykes and the Sweet Hereafter (whose second release, Oh, My Girl, arrives in June), and the yearning, wide-screen sound of Kentucky rockers My Morning Jacket. The humble plainspokenness of Harris' 1979 bluegrass set Blue Kentucky Girl was one touchstone for singer and songwriter Gillian Welch, whose early song Orphan Girl Harris recorded. And, at the same time, it's vital to the lyric-writing approaches of Lucinda Williams and Kathleen Edwards. Pop singer-songwriters, including Margo Timmons of the Cowboy Junkies, Karen Peris of Innocence Mission, and most recently Harmer, emulate Harris' crisp, needlepoint-precise phrasing: When, on her uniformly smart All of Our Names, Harmer describes one she's missing on Tether, she does so with the cool, distanced poise that is one of Harris' signatures. The nature imagery and restless wanderlust that drove much of Harris' early work clearly inspired Patty Griffin, the Boston singer-songwriter who is touring to promote her just-issued Impossible Dream. Griffin is perhaps the most overt Emmylou worshiper. Her voice has a reedy texture that's similar to Harris' -- they harmonize beautifully together -- and her writing, like Harris', pursues the uncomfortable truths lurking behind the glittery facade. Several Impossible Dream songs, particularly the regret-filled Top of the World and an anthem called Don't Come Easy, are Harrislike reflections on the bittersweetness of life, saturated with a sense of dislocation. Venturing beyond the types of songs that naturally suited her voice, Harris showed subsequent generations how to slide into "character" -- to embody the identifying traits of a style without sacrificing one's core persona. Some of her disciples have extended that idea: The New Orleans-born Jolie Holland, whose second album Escondido was recently released, employs a blithe, devil-may-care, Southern-girl drawl that is equally effective on campy vaudeville send-ups and heavy-hearted Civil War ballads. Like Harris, Holland can haunt listeners without working very hard; one allure of her record is the way her voice stumbles into melancholy, on songs where you least expect it. And the blend of homespun homily and otherworldly imagery that distinguishes Harris' more recent songwriting, particularly the originals on Stumble Into Grace, turns up throughout Mindy Smith's debut, One Moment More. Harris does her best singing in a steady slow burn, her conviction transforming almost everything into a kind of hypnotic hymn. Though Smith doesn't possess the same highly refined vocal instrument, she emulates that fire-and-brimstone approach on the chilling blues incantation Come to Jesus. Listen long enough to an artist such as Harris, whose contributions and influence have often been invisible, and you start wondering how such a figure -- a prime (and sometimes uncredited) catalyst for alternative-country, whose ideas about sound and harmony have been assimilated all over the place -- remains so routinely ignored by the commercial mainstream. That might change this summer, when several of those disciples -- Griffin and Welch most prominently -- will join with Harris for the round-robin-style Sweet Harmony Traveling Revue. No matter what songs they choose to sing, it'll be a rare chance to appreciate Harris -- as innovator and matriarch and, most of all, as a spirit. ------------------------------ End of mad-mission-digest V8 #118 *********************************