From: owner-mad-mission-digest@smoe.org (mad-mission-digest) To: mad-mission-digest@smoe.org Subject: mad-mission-digest V9 #29 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 * Also, PLEASE do not quote an entire digest when you reply to the * list.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 Thursday, February 3 2005 Volume 09 : Number 029 Today's Subjects: ----------------- MM: Re: KSGR offer - 2nd notice [Lynette Ensor ] MM: Folkwax CD of the Year... ["Luca, Joseph (EHS)" Subject: MM: Re: KSGR offer - 2nd notice hi MM-ers i offered this up a few days ago and got only one response. it looks like others are still getting many replies, so if anyone still needs this one disc set, i'm prepared to send some out. i have two available to those who will reoffer (i would especially like to hear from digesters!) and i will send another to a non-burner. let me know whether you can reoffer, send on that snail mail address and i will let you know if you are a recipient. i will offer to another group of music lovers if i don't fill up this time. lynette in AK where the snow is falling once again ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 13:18:39 -0500 From: "Luca, Joseph (EHS)" Subject: MM: Folkwax CD of the Year... Howdy--- Well, while Steve Earle copped the artist of the year award, Patty snared CD of the year for "ID." Here's the blurb from "Folkwax": FolkWax Album of the Year: Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream FolkWax Album of the Year Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream Click Cover For More Info As with the Artist of the Year Award, the nominating process for FolkWax Album of the Year 2004 began back in the beginning of December when our readers began making nominations. The nominating process created the final ballot of: Impossible Dream - Patty Griffin Land of Milk and Honey - Eliza Gilkyson The Red Thread - Lucy Kaplansky The Revolution Starts...Now - Steve Earle Tambourine - Tift Merritt Vuelta - Richard Shindell These were all great nominations and it was nice to see that you recognized artists from across the spectrum of singer-songwriters. The staff of FolkWax congratulates each and every nominee for the recognition that our readers have made of your fine work. But in the final voting, again, with record returns and a very close race, you selected Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream as FolkWax Album of the Year. Here is a reprise of Founding Editor Arthur Wood's review of the FolkWax Album of the Year, Impossible Dream by Patty Griffin: Griffin Scores Another Classic (04/22/04) Tantamount to two years ago, in the process of reviewing Patty Griffin's 1000 Kisses, I marked that recording out as a work of art and potentially my selection for album of the year. While a couple of fine releases surfaced later in 2002, none of them topped Griffin's tour de force. In the fall of last year she released the CD/DVD live retrospective A Kiss In Time. While the shadow of Griffin's unreleased Y2K album Silver Bell didn't fall across the latter disc, it had informed 1000 Kisses in the shape of the magnificent biographical reflection "Making Pies," and does the same for this new collection in the form of "Top of The World" and "Mother Of God." In the process of preparing the way for Silver Bell, A&M issued a number of promotional discs and one of them included Patty's bluesy "Standing," produced by Craig Ross, who is at the helm for Impossible Dream. At the time A&M listed the song as "brand spanking new" and as best as I can tell by comparing both recordings they're the same [See Note #1]. First up is the soulful, up-tempo "Love Throws A Line," which opens lyrically with a series of flash card images predicting doom and disaster - "Let's write a story of earth tidal wave, we run out of luck, we run out of days" and "There's a war and a plague, smoke and disaster." All in all, the theme is an urgent reveille call to mankind to wise up, start listening and paying more attention, to one another "just before the flood runs into the valley." When it seems like it's too late for mankind, Griffin adds the necessary (and longed for) cure-all "love throws a line to you and me." "To the end of the earth I'll search for your face, For the one who laid all of our beauty to waste, Threw our hope into hell and our children to the fire, I am the one who crawled through the wire" sets the scene in "Cold As It Gets." Portraying a different facet of the condition explored in the opening cut, it amounts to its political twin. Later on (in the second cut), Griffin reflects on "a million sad stories on the side of the road," then tellingly censures the developed world's 21st Century with "I couldn't care less, I come first" attitude/voyeurism with "strange how we all just got used to the blood, millions of stories that'll never be told, Silent and froze in the mud." Having painted these bleak images Griffin goes deeper "I know a darkness that's darker than cold, A wind that blows as cold as it gets, Blew out the light of my soul," yet by the close she dreams of "Some sunny street not so far away," and closes with the authoritative "I only live to see you live to regret everything that you've done." Do we really have to wonder who "you" is? The slightest flicker of light at the end of this - so far - unremittingly dark tunnel, arrives in the form of track three, "Kite." Beautiful melancholy is one description for what Griffin consistently achieves in word and melody, and from "Kite" onwards wave upon wave of that particular emotion permeates the fabric of Impossible Dream. Supporting herself on piano, played hesitatingly as suits the atmosphere, in "Kite" Patty relates early on "All the trouble went away, And it wasn't just a dream." So what are these "Kites" that "In the middle of night we try and try with all our might, To light a little light down here" and "In the middle of night we dream of a million kites flying high above the sadness and the fear"? Are they earnest prayers, hopeful wishes or life goals yet to be fulfilled? The image-filled lines "Little sister just remember as you wander through the blue, The little kite that you sent flying on a Sunday afternoon, Made of something, light as nothing, Made of joy, that matters too, How the little dreams we dream, are all we can really do" - particularly the fragility and hope encapsulated in the third and fourth, must surely be the most touching that Griffin has committed to paper, and in closing she shifts the overview from earthbound to universal, "The world turns with all its might, the little diamond coloured blue" and then adds "I keep sending little kites until a little light gets through." While the radio friendly "Love Throws A Line" is the first single to be drawn from this recording, "Kites" is one of a handful of Da Vincis on Impossible Dream. As I noted earlier, "Standing" is a soulful number and though short on words, it's the sort of song that you might hear emitting from the open door of a Muscle Shoals, Alabama studio. On the cut, a heavenly choir of voices - is that you Emmylou? - supports Griffin. A medium-paced shuffle "Useless Desires," is a goodbye song wherein the narrator reflects, "I can't make you stay, I can't spend another ten years wishing you would anyway" and adds later, "Every day 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." In "Top Of The World" Griffin's lyric employs the voice of a man, now passed - "One night they called me for supper, But I never got up" - who goes on to express some, now eternal, regret that "I wish I had known you, Wish I had shown you, All of the things I was on the inside." By way of emphasising his frustration having reflected upon the "might have been," as "Top Of The World" fades Patty's parents perform a verse of the Mitch Leigh/Joe Darion song "Impossible Dream," from the musical The Man Of La Mancha. The narrator in Griffin's lyrically repetitive "Rowing Song" has left home and as time and distance take that person further and further away, the narrator recounts how "letters from home never arrive, And I'm alone all of the way, All of the way alone and alive." Irrespective of the latter, you have the feeling that it's a place where the narrator wants to be. The semi-spoken opening lines "The lights are flashing on the highway, I wonder if we're going to ever get home tonight" imbue "Don't Come Easy" with a Springsteen-ish feel. Of course, on 1000 Kisses Patty covered his "Stolen Car." At the heart of Patty's effort lies the sentiment "If you break down, I'll drive out and find you, If you forget my love, I'll try to remind you, I'll stay by you when it don't come easy, When it don't come easy." "Don't Come Easy" once more finds Griffin at the piano, and this track and "Rowing Song" feature some fine understated brass work from Michael Ramos [See Note #2]. I wonder to what extent "Florida" is biographical in terms of Griffin's life, since the Mainer lived there for a period, two decades back? At the outset the story line features two innocent young girls who went "sailing down A1A into the arms of Florida," and is retold in retrospective by one of them - now a wiser, and worldly wearier traveller, who is still resident in the sunshine state - "Isn't it hard sometimes, Isn't it lonely, How I still hang around here, There's nothing to hold me." At the piano, once more, Patty's seven-minute plus melancholic symphony "Mother Of God" immediately follows, and shares a connection to the foregoing cut in the verse, "When I was eighteen I moved to Florida, Like everyone sick of the cold does, And I waited on old people waiting to die, I waited on them until I was." As for references to (The Virgin) Mary, they appear initially in "When I was little I'd stare at her picture, And talk to the mother of God, I swear sometimes I'd see her lips move, Like she was trying to say something to me" and later in "I live too many miles from the ocean, And I'm getting older and odd, I get up every morning with my cup of coffee, And I talk to the mother of God." Winding down gently the acoustic guitar led "Icicles" is the closing cut on Mission Impossible. Mission impossible be damned, this eleven-song masterpiece finds Griffin gazing at us from the top of the mountain, so trumpet it loud and clear "mission accomplished and then some." Notes: Note #1: Both tracks are four-minutes four seconds long. Craig Ross and Jay Joyce were the co-producers of Silver Bell. Note #2: Ramos was instrumental in the inclusion of "Mil Besos" on 1000 Kisses. Arthur Wood is a founding editor of FolkWax The staff of FolkWax congratulates Steve Earle and Patty Griffin on their awards. Me again, with a question. I've heard that plans for a CD featuring performances of last year's songwriter tour with Patty, Dar, Shawn, and MCC have been shelved because Patty wouldn't release the material. Has anyone heard this? Any idea, if it's true, why that would be so? Patty was clearly the star of the series (and this is coming from a Dar fanatic), so it seems odd that she would put the kibosh on something that would seemingly be so wonderful. Thanks! Joe ------------------------------ Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 10:30:09 EST From: Tricia9999@aol.com Subject: MM: Fwd: Your FolkWax Ezine Patty gets album of the year in this venue. See the review below. Return-Path: Received: from rly-yj01.mx.aol.com (rly-yj01.mail.aol.com [172.18.180.161]) by air-yj01.mail.aol.com (v104.17) with ESMTP id MAILINYJ12-7f24201ef62105; Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:31:31 -0500 Received: from vision-10-eth.xdsl.avalon.net (vision-10-eth.xdsl.avalon.net [216.137.67.74]) by rly-yj01.mx.aol.com (v104.17) with ESMTP id MAILRELAYINYJ16-7f24201ef62105; Thu, 03 Feb 2005 04:31:16 -0500 Message-ID: From: Folkwax To: Tricia9999@aol.com Subject: Your FolkWax Ezine Date: Thu, 3 Feb 2005 02:01:06 -0600 X-Mailer: Allaire ColdFusion Application Server List-Unsubscribe: Reply-To: folkwax@visnat.com X-AOL-IP: 216.137.67.74 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="ISO-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit MIME-Version: 1.0 Folkwax Home Page, February 3, 2005

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This Week in FolkWax

FolkWax Artist and Album of the Year

- - In the E-zine: And the winner is  The votes are in and they have been counted. Check out whom you voted as the FolkWax Artist and Album of the Year! - - On our News Page: Martyn Bennett Passes; Peter Yarrow's Missing Guitar Found on eBay; Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard to Team Up; Loretta Lynn Celebrated; New John Prine Album To Release in April; English Folk Club Crisis; This Week on A Prairie Home Companion; Grand Master Fidler Championships Moved; Charlie Poole Featured in 3-CD Box Set; Folk and Bluegrass Festival News, and much more! - - On our Front Porch feature page: FolkWax is Sittin' In With Eric Taylor. Founding editor Arthur Wood had a conversation with Eric Taylor about his Shameless Love album. Check out Part One of this great interview. - - On the Pickin' 'n' Grinnin' page: James Walker reviews Roy Rogers' Live! At The Sierra Nevada Brewery Big Room; Arthur Wood reviews Ray Wylie Hubbard's Delirium Tremolos and David Francey's The Waking Hour (due in stores February 8); P. Kellach Waddle reviews Suzanna Spring's She's Got Your Heart; plus reviews of Fred Eaglesmith's Dusty and the various artists compilation Beautiful Dreamer: The Songs of Stephen Foster. - - One Year Ago Today In FolkWax: FolkWax was "Sittin' In With Eddi Reader, Part Two." Arthur Wood sat down with Eddi Reader and they discussed the Culzean Castle, Celtic Connections, and making the album Sings the Songs of Robert Burns. - - Don't forget to play the Folklore Trivia Game: Remember, everyone who plays is in the drawing for the prize! This week's prize: a two CD pack that includes Buddy Miller's Universal United House of Prayer, courtesy of New West Records, and Vance Gilbert's Unfamiliar Moon, courtesy of Disismye Music. Play Today!

You Have Spoken! FolkWax Artist of the Year: Steve Earle

Yes, the readers of FolkWax, the largest distributed weekly in the singer-songwriter genre, have selected their FolkWax Artist of the Year 2004 and FolkWax Album of the Year 2004. Through the month of December, through your nominations, you created a final ballot of six artists and six albums and then for the past few weeks you voted. As the largest distributed weekly publication in the genre (and one of the largest period!), these awards are open to more fans than any other awards in the genre. The final ballot for FolkWax Artist of the Year you chose was: Steve Earle Eliza Gilkyson Patty Griffin Lucy Kaplansky Tift Merritt Richard Shindell What a stellar group of some of the best singer-songwriters in the world! We congratulate each one for being nominated. With record voting in both categories and the closest Artist of the Year voting in our history (The top three were separated by only a handful of votes!), you have selected Steve Earle as FolkWax Artist of the Year. Considered by many to be one of the founders of the Alt. Country genre, Steve Earle has earned his stripes over the years. Through many twists and turns of fate Earle finds himself back in the saddle of Folk Rock and producing some amazing music. His latest album, The Revolution StartsNow, was a finalist for the FolkWax Album of the Year Award and came in a strong second losing by just five votes! Congratulations to Steve Earle on a fantastic year!

FolkWax Album of the Year: Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream

As with the Artist of the Year Award, the nominating process for FolkWax Album of the Year 2004 began back in the beginning of December when our readers began making nominations. The nominating process created the final ballot of: Impossible Dream - Patty Griffin Land of Milk and Honey - Eliza Gilkyson The Red Thread - Lucy Kaplansky The Revolution StartsNow - Steve Earle Tambourine - Tift Merritt Vuelta - Richard Shindell These were all great nominations and it was nice to see that you recognized artists from across the spectrum of singer-songwriters. The staff of FolkWax congratulates each and every nominee for the recognition that our readers have made of your fine work. But in the final voting, again, with record returns and a very close race, you selected Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream as FolkWax Album of the Year. Here is a reprise of Founding Editor Arthur Wood's review of the FolkWax Album of the Year, Impossible Dream by Patty Griffin: Griffin Scores Another Classic (04/22/04) Tantamount to two years ago, in the process of reviewing Patty Griffin's 1000 Kisses, I marked that recording out as a work of art and potentially my selection for album of the year. While a couple of fine releases surfaced later in 2002, none of them topped Griffin's tour de force. In the fall of last year she released the CD/DVD live retrospective A Kiss In Time. While the shadow of Griffin's unreleased Y2K album Silver Bell didn't fall across the latter disc, it had informed 1000 Kisses in the shape of the magnificent biographical reflection "Making Pies," and does the same for this new collection in the form of "Top of The World" and "Mother Of God." In the process of preparing the way for Silver Bell, A&M issued a number of promotional discs and one of them included Patty's bluesy "Standing," produced by Craig Ross, who is at the helm for Impossible Dream. At the time A&M listed the song as "brand spanking new" and as best as I can tell by comparing both recordings they're the same [See Note #1]. First up is the soulful, up-tempo "Love Throws A Line," which opens lyrically with a series of flash card images predicting doom and disaster - "Let's write a story of earth tidal wave, we run out of luck, we run out of days" and "There's a war and a plague, smoke and disaster." All in all, the theme is an urgent reveille call to mankind to wise up, start listening and paying more attention, to one another "just before the flood runs into the valley." When it seems like it's too late for mankind, Griffin adds the necessary (and longed for) cure-all "love throws a line to you and me." "To the end of the earth I'll search for your face, For the one who laid all of our beauty to waste, Threw our hope into hell and our children to the fire, I am the one who crawled through the wire" sets the scene in "Cold As It Gets." Portraying a different facet of the condition explored in the opening cut, it amounts to its political twin. Later on (in the second cut), Griffin reflects on "a million sad stories on the side of the road," then tellingly censures the developed world's 21st Century with "I couldn't care less, I come first" attitude/voyeurism with "strange how we all just got used to the blood, millions of stories that'll never be told, Silent and froze in the mud." Having painted these bleak images Griffin goes deeper "I know a darkness that's darker than cold, A wind that blows as cold as it gets, Blew out the light of my soul," yet by the close she dreams of "Some sunny street not so far away," and closes with the authoritative "I only live to see you live to regret everything that you've done." Do we really have to wonder who "you" is? The slightest flicker of light at the end of this - so far - unremittingly dark tunnel, arrives in the form of track three, "Kite." Beautiful melancholy is one description for what Griffin consistently achieves in word and melody, and from "Kite" onwards wave upon wave of that particular emotion permeates the fabric of Impossible Dream. Supporting herself on piano, played hesitatingly as suits the atmosphere, in "Kite" Patty relates early on "All the trouble went away, And it wasn't just a dream." So what are these "Kites" that "In the middle of night we try and try with all our might, To light a little light down here" and "In the middle of night we dream of a million kites flying high above the sadness and the fear"? Are they earnest prayers, hopeful wishes or life goals yet to be fulfilled? The image-filled lines "Little sister just remember as you wander through the blue, The little kite that you sent flying on a Sunday afternoon, Made of something, light as nothing, Made of joy, that matters too, How the little dreams we dream, are all we can really do" - particularly the fragility and hope encapsulated in the third and fourth, must surely be the most touching that Griffin has committed to paper, and in closing she shifts the overview from earthbound to universal, "The world turns with all its might, the little diamond coloured blue" and then adds "I keep sending little kites until a little light gets through." While the radio friendly "Love Throws A Line" is the first single to be drawn from this recording, "Kites" is one of a handful of Da Vincis on Impossible Dream. As I noted earlier, "Standing" is a soulful number and though short on words, it's the sort of song that you might hear emitting from the open door of a Muscle Shoals, Alabama studio. On the cut, a heavenly choir of voices - is that you Emmylou? - supports Griffin. A medium-paced shuffle "Useless Desires," is a goodbye song wherein the narrator reflects, "I can't make you stay, I can't spend another ten years wishing you would anyway" and adds later, "Every day 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." In "Top Of The World" Griffin's lyric employs the voice of a man, now passed - "One night they called me for supper, But I never got up" - who goes on to express some, now eternal, regret that "I wish I had known you, Wish I had shown you, All of the things I was on the inside." By way of emphasising his frustration having reflected upon the "might have been," as "Top Of The World" fades Patty's parents perform a verse of the Mitch Leigh/Joe Darion song "Impossible Dream," from the musical The Man Of La Mancha. The narrator in Griffin's lyrically repetitive "Rowing Song" has left home and as time and distance take that person further and further away, the narrator recounts how "letters from home never arrive, And I'm alone all of the way, All of the way alone and alive." Irrespective of the latter, you have the feeling that it's a place where the narrator wants to be. The semi-spoken opening lines "The lights are flashing on the highway, I wonder if we're going to ever get home tonight" imbue "Don't Come Easy" with a Springsteen-ish feel. Of course, on 1000 Kisses Patty covered his "Stolen Car." At the heart of Patty's effort lies the sentiment "If you break down, I'll drive out and find you, If you forget my love, I'll try to remind you, I'll stay by you when it don't come easy, When it don't come easy." "Don't Come Easy" once more finds Griffin at the piano, and this track and "Rowing Song" feature some fine understated brass work from Michael Ramos [See Note #2]. I wonder to what extent "Florida" is biographical in terms of Griffin's life, since the Mainer lived there for a period, two decades back? At the outset the story line features two innocent young girls who went "sailing down A1A into the arms of Florida," and is retold in retrospective by one of them - now a wiser, and worldly wearier traveller, who is still resident in the sunshine state - "Isn't it hard sometimes, Isn't it lonely, How I still hang around here, There's nothing to hold me." At the piano, once more, Patty's seven-minute plus melancholic symphony "Mother Of God" immediately follows, and shares a connection to the foregoing cut in the verse, "When I was eighteen I moved to Florida, Like everyone sick of the cold does, And I waited on old people waiting to die, I waited on them until I was." As for references to (The Virgin) Mary, they appear initially in "When I was little I'd stare at her picture, And talk to the mother of God, I swear sometimes I'd see her lips move, Like she was trying to say something to me" and later in "I live too many miles from the ocean, And I'm getting older and odd, I get up every morning with my cup of coffee, And I talk to the mother of God." Winding down gently the acoustic guitar led "Icicles" is the closing cut on Mission Impossible. Mission impossible be damned, this eleven-song masterpiece finds Griffin gazing at us from the top of the mountain, so trumpet it loud and clear "mission accomplished and then some." Notes: Note #1: Both tracks are four-minutes four seconds long. Craig Ross and Jay Joyce were the co-producers of Silver Bell. Note #2: Ramos was instrumental in the inclusion of "Mil Besos" on 1000 Kisses. Arthur Wood is a founding editor of FolkWax The staff of FolkWax congratulates Steve Earle and Patty Griffin on their awards.

This Week in our Sister Publication, BluesWax: BluesWax Artist and Album of the year for 2004!

CONGRATULATIONS!!! " MuddyW " is the winner of this week's FolkWax CD prize pack, a David Francey CD, "Waking Hour", from Jericho Beach Music. Go to the Backstage to collect your prize. Remember to play the quiz each week for your chance to win great prizes!

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