PATTY GRIFFIN 'Impossible Dream' comes straight from the heart

The singer gets her political message across with soft lyrics.
By ERIC R. DANTON
HARTFORD COURANT
Patty Griffin has a knack for writing and singing songs that seem to stop time while they fill in the empty places in your soul.
Her 2002 release, "1000 Kisses," drew the highest praise possible: rave reviews from the likes of Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Dave Matthews and Mary Chapin Carpenter. The album was a marvel of moody arrangements and careful production, things Griffin deliberately avoided on her latest, "Impossible Dream," released this week on ATO Records.
"Compared to the last record, there was not a huge effort to sing pretty," Griffin says from her home in Austin, Texas. "I was just sort of going for performances and trying not to edit myself down to, you know, an idea of perfection that had to do with notes and vibrations falling into what you're used to hearing. There's a lot of dirt, I feel, in some of the performances."
There's a spontaneous feel to many of the songs, as if she poured them directly from her heart onto tape. In a sense, that's exactly what she did.
Difficult themes
"I think some of the things that are being brought up on the record, it feels harder to sing about than other things I've sung before," Griffin says. "The first song is somewhat apocalyptic, and it goes from there to the Holocaust, so that's sort of where I'm at."
"Let's write a story of a tidal wave," she sings on the first track, "Love Throw a Line." "We ran out of luck/We ran out of days."
It's part of a message that is more universal, and political, than most of her individual-oriented earlier work. Griffin says "Impossible Dream" is her attempt to talk "to the rest of us" about political realities that are increasingly difficult to ignore.
"I think we have to deal with it," she says "We are pulled along by certain forces on this planet and we don't really have a mindset that allows us to believe we have other options sometimes, when it comes to the old standard war, for instance."
Awareness of genocide
Her own political awakening came in 1999. Griffin became active with the Committee to Abolish Landmines and visited Cambodia, where the countryside is littered with the deadly, buried devices.
"I really saw it up close, and long after the fact, what a genocide leaves behind, and that was something that changed me forever," she says. "I wouldn't say I'm obsessed with genocide, but the fact that we've had so many on the planet, anyone who has an ounce of sense has to be paying attention to that. What is that saying about our species?"
The album isn't a collection of shrill political screeds, however. Griffin employs soft imagery in her lyrics, and augments the folk numbers with a hot, dusty gospel sensibility on "Standing." Although she has long loved gospel music, the redheaded singer says she has tried to stay away from it on her records.
"Really, a lot of it had to do with looking like Bonnie Raitt and just having to carve my own way," she says. "Another reason is, I worked so hard and studied that music for such a long time and I felt like the best I could do was try to imitate it."
Then she started listening to the Staples Singers.
"I need that music," Griffin says. "What they're singing about is some really hard stuff, some of the toughest things you can sing about, but you feel uplifted when you hear that music."
Strong folk influences
Despite the gospel and soul influences, Griffin says "Impossible Dream" is probably the most "folk" record she has made. It's also one of the most personal, and the challenge for Griffin was to make her personal themes accessible.
"To me, the idea is to talk about it and really be real and still everybody is feeling good," she says. "You don't want to pull people into the darkness. I think people are already afraid of the darkness, that's probably why they're not going there. You kind of want to show them that you know it, and that it's OK."