If you met the people in Patty Griffin's songs, you might never remember them. They might hand you your change or shuffle past you in the rain, and their quiet faces would hide the fact that they're burning alive. Because even though they're plain—-factory workers, widowers, farmers—-these men and women endure things they can barely describe. In song after song, Griffin uses her voice and her lyrics to unleash the pain of those who have no practice expressing themselves. Even when the music stays quiet, we're almost always given the sense of a dam finally breaking. And that flood of emotion is what makes listening to Patty Griffin's music, as sad as it is, so exhilarating.
That paradox is present even in the sound of her voice. Capable of everything from high, soft crooning to throaty wails, it is an instrument that demands admiration. But the glorious technical ability is rocked by tremors of sadness in her voice. There's a rough edge on every note that warns she's about to be overcome. This graveled rasp means she will never sound absolutely pure, but she will always sound alive.
Perhaps because she understands her sound so well, Griffin regularly matches her voice with bittersweet words. Taken together, her songs cohere into a sweeping story of loneliness and loss that only occasionally gets conquered. With each song, she finds a new facet of sadness. More importantly, she finds a new story to tell.
There are three rough categories for Patty Griffin's stories. Not all of them involve the lonely people described above, but they all add contours to the world those people inhabit. Generally, the categories are:
(1) first person narratives in which Griffin might be singing about herself,
(2) third person narratives in which she sings about other people, and
(3) first person narratives in which she has obviously taken on another persona.
Griffin's third-person songs tend to be her most restrained. She takes us to the edge of someone's pain and leaves us there, describing it just enough to let us feel the rest of the ache for ourselves. Her sense of dramatic arc, however, remains strong. Consider how much we learn about the heroine of "Sweet Lorraine," who appears on the album "Living With Ghosts." This is a woman who has been fighting for years to escape a legacy of hatred and cruelty in her family. In a few phrases, Griffin lets us know she's the kind of reckless woman who will "say outlandish things to her family just to scare them" and who will do anything to keep her life going forward. She starts businesses that fail. She goes to school. She gets married. But it's not dramatic simply to run. Griffin shows us exactly what Lorraine is running from. She tells us that Lorraine's "father called her a slut and a whore on the night before her wedding day," and she says the poor girl's "mother threw stones at her on the day that she moved." It's easy to paint the rest of Lorraine's picture ourselves. From: http://itotallyhearthat.blogspot.com/2006/12/thoughts-on-patty-griffin.html
