IMPOSSIBLE NO MORE: SADNESS AS A PATTY GRIFFIN VIRTUE IN WIND BACK WEDNESDAY

In less than a month, the great Patty Griffin releases a new album, one which will add to a catalogue as good as anyone writing these days. It’s to be called Crown Of Roses. Yes, you bet it will be reviewed here.

That stellar reputation has been hard earned in a relatively late-arriving recording career that goes back to 1996’s Living With Ghosts, was most recently seen in the Covid-era Tape, in 2022, and along the way has been some landmark albums. One of those arrived 21 years ago (more like 20 in Australia where it didn’t actually get a release but could be hunted down) in her fourth song collection, Impossible Dream.

You could do worse than start here if you’re new to her. You could do some good too if you have a direct line to some or other deity who might influence Ms Griffin, once of the north-east, long a resident of Austin, Texas, to make another of her extremely rare visits to Australia.

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PATTY GRIFFIN

Impossible Dream (ATO)

SADNESS IS AN UNDERAPPRECIATED and underutilised emotion in popular music.

I know what you’re thinking: it’s the basis of pop ballads and the cornerstone of most what they call emo, so what am I going on about? But the truth is we get the overblown anguish of the emotionally overwrought. It’s all so big, so self-consciously needy that it quickly loses its attraction and its effectiveness.

Real sadness, where you feel that hollow in your chest that seems to have a long tunnel of nothing but wind and regrets, where you are still but churning, silent but crying out, that’s rare. It’s rare because it takes the finest of songwriting, a nuanced lyric and a voice that says everything even when the lyrics aren’t there. Like Patty Griffin.

Look no further than two songs at the centre of this album, Top Of The World (a song recently covered by the Dixie Chicks after an earlier version first appeared on an unreleased album of Griffin’s called Silver Bell that supplies two other songs here) and Rowing Song.

In Top Of The World, Griffin voices a middle-aged widower drowning in regrets. Not big ones, but small ones that eat away at him, chip away at his protection and render him unable to see beyond the emptiness. She begins softly, finishes urgently but never, not in the guitar and violin backing, not in the chorus that reaches out nor the voice that reaches in does she ever feel anything but crushingly sad. And real.

Rowing Song is much sparser lyrically, its finger-picked guitar is augmented only by tuba and trumpet. But there’s a sting in the tail of the chorus “the further I go, more letters from home never arrive/And I’m alone, all of the way/Alone and alive” and it comes subtly but surely.

The value of these songs is clear by time you reach the devastating and devastatingly good stories of missed chances and slipping youth in Florida, and flattened life in Mother Of God. Because by now, even if you wanted to you’d be hard pressed not to feel a swelling in your chest, a thickening in your head, and something very much like tears as Griffin, over the piano backing, says “I live too many miles from the ocean/And I’m getting older and odd/I get up every morning with my cup of coffee/And talk to the mother of God.”

READ MORE

Isn’t She A River: The Patty Griffin Interview

Patty Griffin – Tape: album review

Patty Griffin City Recital Hall Sydney 2020: live review

Patty Griffin’s Crown Of Roses is out on July 25, on PGM/Thirty Tigers