This is an excerpt from the print edition of Dirty Linen magazine #102 (October / November 2002). The magazine is available on newsstands and by subscription.

Patty Griffin
Emotion &Energy
by Kerry Dexter

Patty Griffin's songs have been recorded by artists as diverse as the bluegrass group Southern Rail, country superstar trio the Dixie Chicks, and folk Grammy winner Emmylou Harris. She's lent backing vocals to projects by mystic cowboy Ray Wylie Hubbard, Harris, and and alt-country heartbreaker Julie Miller. So what do Griffin's own recordings sound like?

To begin with, she has a unique, sultry alto that holds a tinge of blues, and though she's from Maine, a hint of Southern twang. She's a gifted writer, and a gifted interpreter of song, as well. "She's just so giving in performance, there's so much emotion and energy," commented fellow musician Buddy Miller. "Put her voice together with the songs she put on this record, and it's just amazing. I can't stop listening to it."

"I didn't really try to make anything fit for this record," Griffin said of her most recent release, 1000 Kisses. "But you know, I was talking to Doug Lancio, who co-produced it with me — I was lookin' at the list and said this album actually hangs together, even though they were some I'd just written plus some leftovers from other projects. They all worked together, probably because they're all really sad!" Griffin said, laughing.

Griffin is a storyteller with a unique point of view, no doubt of that, and the tales she chooses are often about people confronting the darker sides of life. That insight is combined with a compelling voice and a musical intelligence that allows the singer to explore the melodic and emotional layers of each phrase while keeping things deceptively simple. Griffin knows her strengths, too. Respected music writer Dave Marsh commented in The Austin Chronicle that "Griffin's songs are so good, in part, because they're crafted to be sung...it's not that [she] sacrifices sense to sound — she's too good to have to make such choices — it's just that her music is so, well, musical."

That began in her childhood. "My grandmother is a singer, my mother is a singer, it was just a part of their everyday life to sing, you know," she reflected. "They sang all the time, doing work around the house. I thought that's what everybody did, growing up." That was in Old Town, in western Maine, and the songs were in both English and French. Griffin's mother's family is French Canadian. That may account, she speculated, for the Southern tinge in her accent. "There is, and always has been, a twang in my voice," she said. "And something nasal, too. I think that's the French Canadian stuff, actually — anyway, I love that sound. And I can't really help it — I've got the nose!"

Griffin got her first guitar when she was 16 and began writing songs right away, but she kept them mostly to herself. "I was a little too shy to play out much," she said, though she did a brief stint with a cover band. " I did have a pretty wide range of things I was listening to back then. The Beatles were my first really big wow! band, from an early age," she recalled. She was the youngest of seven children, and the records her older siblings brought home, among them releases by Rickie Lee Jones and Bruce Springsteen, also made a lasting impression on the teenager.

Griffin wasn't thinking of a career in music after high school, but after living in Florida for a short time, she moved to Boston, married, and worked as a waitress and a telephone operator while continuing to write songs. While she remained on the edges of the Boston/Cambridge music scene, she became friends with and occasionally played with local artists, such as Ellis Paul. She also hooked up with guitar teacher John Curtis. "I got a guitar teacher, so at least I'd have to play in front of him every week!" she recalled, laughing. "I was too timid to get out there and play, and he helped me out a lot that way. He booked a gig for us to do together, and then we started doing more, where he'd play guitar and I'd play guitar and sing. It was a lot easier for me to get onstage that way. I think I was kind of overwhelmed by the city, coming from such a small town. And I had a lot of work to do." She also credits Curtis and her Boston friends with giving her tips on editing her writing and planning arrangements. One of her songs, "I Write the Book," was included on Legacy II: A Collection of Singer Songwriters, which was a project of the High Street label, a Windham Hill subsidiary that at the time had signed Pierce Pettis, John Gorka, and Patty Larkin, among others.
Some demos Griffin recorded around this time in Boston came to the attention of A&M Records. Intrigued by the combinations of bluesy, gutsy vocal and intelligent, intimate lyrics, they offered her a deal and matched her up with producer Nile Rogers. They recorded elaborately arranged versions of the songs at Daniel Lanois' Kingsway Studio in New Orleans, and the label hated the result. It was "very beautiful, but I felt like I played a very small part in it," Griffin said. She proposed that rather than redo the album, they release the demos, with just her vocals and guitar, as the record. With a few minor fixes, that's what happened, and it became the 1996 release Living With Ghosts. That turned out to be a record that established Griffin as a distinctive voice in the singer/songwriter genre, drew praise from those in the Americana scene, and enabled Griffin to set out on a very long solo tour.

But..."I always felt like I wrote rock songs," she said. "It was all I listened to. I lacked confidence — I didn't feel like I had enough to offer a rock band. That's what I always thought I was writing, though."

This is an excerpt from an article in Dirty Linen #102 (Oct./Nov. '02). Read the full text in the magazine, available via subscription or on newsstands and in bookstores.