From: owner-mad-mission-digest@smoe.org (mad-mission-digest) To: mad-mission-digest@smoe.org Subject: mad-mission-digest V9 #36 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 * Also, PLEASE do not quote an entire digest when you reply to the * list.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 Friday, February 11 2005 Volume 09 : Number 036 Today's Subjects: ----------------- MM: Patty/Eliza article ["Luca, Joseph \(EHS\)" ] MM: RE: Patty/Eliza article ["sheryl novak" ] MM: this link worked for me re: Patty/Eliza article ["Larry Israelson" ] MM: NYT article [hooligan ] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:33:38 -0500 From: "Luca, Joseph \(EHS\)" Subject: MM: Patty/Eliza article Howdy--- A friend sent me this link; it's a nice piece about these two friends who happen to be rather gifted singer/songwriters. Ciao, Joe http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/statesman/2005/11grammys.ht ml;COXnetJSessionID=CMcJDutQ00Uq7nUPDKqUXcd2CREqomv3yC1TW7J1tFZ2UnHZ9iTp !6552243?urac=n&urvf081390178580.7013629362051901 <> ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 13:39:02 -0600 From: "sheryl novak" Subject: MM: RE: Patty/Eliza article it doesn't open to an article...it just has some mumbo jumbo about the Austin American Statesman. Sheryl L. Novak, Administrator sherylnovak@sbcglobal.net JOHN MICHAEL'S SALON 900 Round Rock Ave. Ste. 309 Round Rock Texas 78681 512-388-4603 www.johnmichaelssalon.com - -----Original Message----- From: owner-mad-mission@smoe.org [mailto:owner-mad-mission@smoe.org]On Behalf Of Luca, Joseph (EHS) Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 12:34 PM To: mad-mission@smoe.org Subject: MM: Patty/Eliza article Howdy--- A friend sent me this link; it's a nice piece about these two friends who happen to be rather gifted singer/songwriters. Ciao, Joe http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/statesman/2005/11grammys.ht ml;COXnetJSessionID=CMcJDutQ00Uq7nUPDKqUXcd2CREqomv3yC1TW7J1tFZ2UnHZ9iTp !6552243?urac=n&urvf081390178580.7013629362051901 <> ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:50:29 -0800 From: "Larry Israelson" Subject: MM: this link worked for me re: Patty/Eliza article http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/statesman/2005/11grammys.ht ml Cheers, Larry I in LA - -----Original Message----- From: owner-mad-mission@smoe.org [mailto:owner-mad-mission@smoe.org] On Behalf Of sheryl novak Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 11:39 AM To: 'Luca, Joseph (EHS)'; mad-mission@smoe.org Subject: MM: RE: Patty/Eliza article it doesn't open to an article...it just has some mumbo jumbo about the Austin American Statesman. Sheryl L. Novak, Administrator sherylnovak@sbcglobal.net JOHN MICHAEL'S SALON 900 Round Rock Ave. Ste. 309 Round Rock Texas 78681 512-388-4603 www.johnmichaelssalon.com - -----Original Message----- From: owner-mad-mission@smoe.org [mailto:owner-mad-mission@smoe.org]On Behalf Of Luca, Joseph (EHS) Sent: Friday, February 11, 2005 12:34 PM To: mad-mission@smoe.org Subject: MM: Patty/Eliza article Howdy--- A friend sent me this link; it's a nice piece about these two friends who happen to be rather gifted singer/songwriters. Ciao, Joe http://www.austin360.com/music/content/music/statesman/2005/11grammys.ht ml;COXnetJSessionID=CMcJDutQ00Uq7nUPDKqUXcd2CREqomv3yC1TW7J1tFZ2UnHZ9iTp !6552243?urac=n&urvf081390178580.7013629362051901 <> ------------------------------ Date: Fri, 11 Feb 2005 14:22:11 -0500 From: "Luca, Joseph \(EHS\)" Subject: MM: Patty/Eliza article Howdy again--- I understand that there's been some difficulty with the link I just sent. Here, then, is the text of the article. Ciao, Joe Sisters of the sad song Austin's Eliza Gilkyson and Patty Griffin are singer-songwriters joined at the soul. And they're up for the same Grammy By Brad Buchholz American-Statesman Staff Feb. 11, 2005 Eliza Gilkyson and Patty Griffin are good friends, sisters in song. They have toured together, recorded together, shared a creative kinship through their music. Both released landmark albums in 2004 -- Gilkyson's "Land of Milk and Honey" and Griffin's "Impossible Dream." And as fate would have it, both have been nominated for a Grammy Award ... in the same category. So let us take a moment to acknowledge this happy little story -- the kind of Grammy story that has nothing to do with winners and losers, or celebrity, or what Alicia Keys intends to wear to the Sunday night award ceremony. Let us celebrate good Austin music and good Austin friends. Let us focus on Eliza and Patty's shared affinity for sad songs and social consciousness. Eliza is the earthy sister, tall and bold, a daughter of the American West. Her best songs have dirt and grit and spines in them -- and if they were any softer, they wouldn't be true. Eliza sees God in nature. She says exactly what she means. On stage, she's quick to crack a joke about her own vanity. Then she'll sing a song that will break your heart. Patty is the ethereal sister, tiny and demure, a daughter of rural Maine. Her best songs have a misty, visceral quality -- and to step inside her CDs is to enter an envelope of rare emotional climates. Patty sees hope and humanity in a kite's tail. She speaks in the language of metaphor. On stage, she'll introduce a song with a whisper. Then she'll sing a song that will break your heart. Both women live quiet, simple lives in Austin -- Eliza in South Austin, Patty near Hyde Park. Both lavish their attention on tiny dogs. And both share a certain artistic courage, the ability to lay themselves naked, to show all manner of vulnerabilities, to express sorrow and doubt and anguish and regret and defiance, in the name of connection. At the Grammys, Eliza Gilkyson and Patty Griffin are "competing" for Best Contemporary Folk Album. It is not a prime-time, call-the-winner-to-the-stage Grammy category. All the same, it is one of great integrity, a category that consistently honors music that thinks and feels, music that honors a writerly voice. Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Emmylou Harris have all won this Grammy. So, too, have Shawn Colvin, Nanci Griffith and Lucinda Williams -- singer-songwriters with deep Austin connections. Eliza makes it very clear that she has no expectation of winning the prize. ("I'm the long shot," she says. "This will be Patty's win." ) Yet Eliza plans to attend the ceremony. It is her first nomination, and it's a sweet one, too, for it brings a measure of national attention and respect to an artist who first began performing and recording in Austin more than 20 years ago. "This may be the only time this will happen to me," says Eliza, who grew up in Southern California, the daughter of the late folk songwriter Terry Gilkyson. "I owe it to myself to go and enjoy it." Patty? She will not be in L.A. for the ceremony, as it is her conviction that there's too much hype in the culture of awards. Patty didn't go two years ago, either, when she was nominated for "1,000 Kisses." Better for the industry, she suggests, to spend time and money on music education for children. Patty even declined to talk about Eliza, and the craft of song, on the occasion of the Grammys. Nothing personal, she says. It's just her policy not to "do media" for awards shows. These sisters of song are very different people. Eliza is as open as Patty is intensely private. But this difference is actually what makes their musical story more compelling, as we know these two women see a bit of themselves in each other. "I think our friendship came about through mutual appreciation that we were both really pushing our envelope as individuals," says Eliza. "Kind of self-discovery. Kind of like, 'I see you over there. You're on a very similar path as me, and you have your own way of expressing it.' That's why it's amusing, really, that we're both nominated at the same time." Griffin is a great writer -- and not just of words and couplets. Her command of tone and imagery gives her music its ethereal depth. Sometimes her songs are like expressionist paintings, where texture and mood, more than a literal image, tell the story of the work. You may not always "get" the meaning of a Patty Griffin song, all the while realizing you're deeply moved by it. "Patty is the queen of that, really in the way she taps into the mystery, that kind of awesome other-ness," says Eliza. "She may be using a vehicle that might be about a relationship, or a person in her life. But you sense that you're standing on the brink of the great unconscious. I don't know anyone who goes there more fearlessly than Patty. "Her music just keeps unfolding for you. It will meet you as deep as you want to go. And that's a beautiful and rare thing." Eliza had long admired Patty's albums. But traveling on the road with Griffin -- opening the show, for a time, during the "1,000 Kisses" album tour of 2003 -- gave Eliza a heightened appreciation of Patty's artistic command. "I'd go out (into the audience) after every show and just sit there and allow myself to go on that trip," says Eliza. "And it amazed me, the way the music would draw me back night after night. She takes you to a place -- and she holds you there. "It's not for the faint of heart, you know, to go riding around in there. But I do feel it's the artist's job to make you feel safe in a land of danger. It's like, 'How do you find your way into this place where anything could happen?' But at the same time, it's safe to expose the nerve." Eliza and Patty have a deep affinity for the sad song; it's part of their emotional makeup. At the start of her singing career, Griffin once failed an audition for a Downy fabric-softener jingle because her voice sounded "too sad." No one uses imagery of funerals and shrouds more boldly. "I know a cold as cold as it gets," she sings on the "Impossible Dream" album. And we believe her. ... Folk winners The Grammy awards show will be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday on CBS. Here's a look back at the Best Contemporary Folk Album category winners and the 2004 nominees. 1986 -- Various artists, 'Tribute to Steve Goodman' 1987 -- Steve Goodman, 'Unfinished Business' 1988 -- Tracy Chapman, 'Tracy Chapman' 1989 -- Indigo Girls, 'Indigo Girls' 1990 -- Shawn Colvin, 'Steady On' 1991 -- John Prine, 'The Missing Years' 1992 -- Chieftains, 'Another Country' 1993 -- Nanci Griffith, 'Other Voices, Other Rooms' 1994 -- Johnny Cash, 'American Recordings' 1995 -- Emmylou Harris, 'Wrecking Ball' 1996 -- Bruce Springsteen, 'The Ghost of Tom Joad' 1997 -- Bob Dylan, 'Time Out of Mind' 1998 -- Lucinda Williams, 'Car Wheels on a Gravel Road' 1999 -- Tom Waits, 'Mule Variations' 2000 -- Emmylou Harris, 'Red Dirt Girl' 2001 -- Bob Dylan, 'Love & Theft' 2002 -- Nickel Creek, 'This Side' 2003 -- Warren Zevon, 'The Wind' 2004 nominees -- Ani DiFranco, 'Educated Guess'; Steve Earle, 'The Revolution Starts . . . Now'; Eliza Gilkyson, 'Land Of Milk and Honey'; Patty Griffin, 'Impossible Dream'; Various artists, 'The Un- broken Circle -- The Musical Heritage Of The Carter Family' On stage, Eliza will joke about her own inability to "do whimsy" and then launch into "Tender Mercies," with its opening image of a suicide bomber: "Across the world she tapes explosives to her chest, steps into a shopping mall." Eliza's sad songs often feature characters on the other side of pain -- wounded, fallible, but wiser, too. She's the rare artist in contemporary song who digs deeply into psychological nuance. The theme that unites Gilkyson's muscular "Land of Milk and Honey" and Griffin's moody "Impossible Dream" is longing. Both artists sing about an awareness of separateness, and the desire to connect with the elusive: Wisdom. Solace. Humanity. Peace on Earth. "Eliza has a lot of that Townes Van Zandt quality, when Townes was younger," says Ray Wylie Hubbard, who just recorded a version of Gilkyson's "Beauty Way" on his latest CD. "Townes' songs always had a lot of depth and weight. Eliza's songs are like that, too. Her lyrics just reach out and grab you by the throat. Her soul just pours out of her. And yet: She's hilarious on stage! She takes herself lightly, you know? "I always feel enlightened when I hear an Eliza song. And the motivating thing about Eliza and her music is what she can contribute to life. You know, she's not one of these people who says, 'What can I get?' It's actually about what she can give, and contribute to humankind right now." Both Eliza and Patty address the Iraq war on their albums, though Gilkyson plays her hand face up, referring to little men in the White House, while Patty works with allusions involving kites and coliseums. The two sing together on behalf of peace to close Gilkyson's album, joining Mary Chapin Carpenter and Iris DeMent on a long-lost Woody Guthrie anthem titled "Peace Call." Eliza felt compelled to write several songs about current events on "Land of Milk and Honey" -- not because she wanted to do "political" material, but because the build-up to war in 2003 and the ensuing invasion were breaking her heart. It was impossible to separate that pain from the music. "The human condition is my issue. That's been the case with me all along," says Gilkyson. "This is not a happy time. It is not a mindless time. While I'm experiencing a deep satisfaction in my life right now, there is at the same time a sense of woefulness in the human story. It's on my mind. I'm preoccupied with it. I don't think I'm a real fun person to be around right now." And here she starts to laugh. "Because I'm worried!" Hubbard recognizes the soul of his friend in the words. "There's an old quote I like: The opposite of injustice isn't justice. It's love," says Hubbard. "Eliza sees in this world that the correct response to injustice is love. Because she cares. She feels it. It's not sympathy -- it's an empathy she has that allows her to see through other people's eyes, to know their pain." Two great souls. Two great albums. On Sunday night, the winner in this Grammy category is clearly Austin. We are richer for their presence, these two sisters of song. ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 14 Aug 2004 13:38:41 -0400 From: hooligan Subject: MM: NYT article - ------------------------------------------------------------------------ August 14, 2004 After a Long Wait, Harvest of Success By JANE GROSS USTIN, 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." Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company | Home | Privacy Policy | Search | Corrections | RSS | Help | Back to Top ------------------------------ End of mad-mission-digest V9 #36 ********************************