Words Are Enough: Patty Griffin

A few years ago Patty Griffin played a show at the House of Blues on Sunset Strip. It was amazing that this tiny woman with an acoustic guitar could so fill the big place with a joyful sound, even as she sang about alienation and heartbreak. Then a spectral presence in a diaphanous dress appeared behind Patty, and people nudged one another all through the crowd — for it was the legendary Emmy Lou Harris, in a fabulous gown. Emmy Lou stepped to the microphone to sing backup, announcing seriously, "I've just come from the Grammy Awards, and this ..." (with a crowning hand over Patty's head) "... is who should've been on that stage."

Indeed, having turned out great songs since 1992, Patty Griffin seems to get due respect mostly from fellow songwriters, some of whom (Emmy Lou, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Bette Midler and the infamous Dixie Chicks) have covered her songs. Others, like Steve Earle and Lyle Lovett, list her emphatically among their heroes. Still, Patty seems to be a bit challenging for most, though she writes hooks like Lennon and McCartney, and has a voice more torchy than Opry. Perhaps she's not Apple Pie enough. Instead she's an unflinching writer, unapologetic about the bittersweetness of her work.

Often drawing on her early years in rural Maine (more Deliverance than Kennebunkport, it seems), Griffin fashions hard little narratives in sparely authenticating detail, and sets them to some of today's most haunting melodies. With mind-meld empathy, she depicts an amazing range of characters: a grieving widower, a shell-shocked vet, an alienated heiress and a white-trash mother. Here she introduces Tony, a small-town "faggot" and ultimate suicide:

Does anyone remember Tony / A quiet boy, little over weight / He had breasts like a girl / When I wasn't too busy feeling lonely / I'd stare over his shoulder / At a map of the world / He always finished all his homework / Raised his hand in homerooom / He called the morning attendance / With the pledge allegiance to the gloom

At other times she seems to speak straight from the heart, evoking unadorned emotion. In a few lines of "Goodbye" she provides a phenomenology of grief, the way it doesn't wound with one fell, melodramatic swoop, but lurks, blindsiding you long after the fact:

Today my heart is big and sore / it's tryin' to push right through my skin / I won't see you anymore / I guess that's finally sinkin' in

Much of Griffin's material is dark, but she can be funny, punny and glib, too, as in the imagistic "Careful" — just a shot-list really with various "girls" — cool, breezy, sophistiqué as a perfume commercial, "All the girls in the restaurant / Pretending to be nonchalant / Funny girls on the TV shows / Close your eyes and they turn to snow..." And she can laugh at herself, as in "Mad Mission":

We were drinking like the Irish / But we were drinking scotch / Bartender turned on a movie / Everybody turned to watch / And every single eye was gleaming / As he reached the final scene / Well, at least mine did / Here's lookin' at you, kid

In "Nobody's Cryin'" Patty gives another take on the Big Goodbye, moving from mock-heroic metaphor to resonant, photorealist detail, richly emblematic yet concrete as a letter-bomb.

Well he jumps in the taxi, headed for the sky / He's off to slay some demon dragonfly / And he looked at me, that long last time / Turned away again and I waved goodbye / In an envelope, inside his coat / Is a chain I wore, around my throat / With a note I wrote / Said I love you but I don't... / even know why.

Griffin's long pause on the last line, denoting ambivalence or denial, rescues the whole thing from cliché. If one tried to put that trope in fiction or on film it would probably just be laborious or lugubrious; here, as a throwaway opening to a vignette about forgiveness, it gives a rich sense of what the note means, and doesn't, to both of the characters.

There's not much bling or partying in Patty Griffin's oeuvre, instead there is the paradox of dark beauty, some our hardest moments hauntingly redeemed through precise, cathartic articulation.

— David Essex (djessex@earthlink.net)