Patty Griffin’s poignant ‘Kisses’

Becoming the first artist to sign with independent, artist-friendly ATO (a tough-in-cheek acronym for “According To Our”) Records, co-founded by Dave Matthews, has proved to be a creative and financial windfall for David Gray, whose earliest influences include Irish traditional music.
“White Ladder,” an album he had to self-release in Europe, was issued stateside by ATO in February 2000. Since then, his CD has reaped critical acclaim and, with the help of the hit single “Babylon,” sold at the multi-platinum level. It topped the charts for weeks in Ireland, where Gray has become almost an adopted son.
Hopefully, some of that marketplace success will rub off on “1000 Kisses,” Patty Griffin’s first album for ATO and third release overall. Her first two CDs, the acoustic “Living With Ghosts” in 1996 and the rock-oriented “Flaming Red” in 1998, were major-label recordings that made her something of a critics’ darling and sold in the range of
100,000-150,000.
With a voice that can vault from a whisper to a wail, Griffin writes songs conveying the immediacy and felt reality of life. Emotions are bared rather than bundled up in glibness. It’s no wonder why so many singers are attracted to her compositions: the Dixie Chicks (“Let Him Fly”), Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt (“Falling Down”), Bette Midler (“Moses”), Martina McBride (“Goodbye”), and Reba McEntire (“Up and Flying”). Clare-born vocalist Maura O’Connell went so far as to record three Griffin songs on her “Walls & Windows” album last year: “I Wonder,” “Poor Man’s House,” and “Long Ride Home.”
Back then, I criticized this Griffin tropism by O’Connell in a review. But hearing Griffin’s own rendition of “Long Ride Home,” graced by Emmylou Harris on harmony and the accordion playing of ex-BoDeans member Michael Ramos, is a revelation.
In the song, a man reflects on his marriage in the limousine traveling back from where he had just buried his wife. “Forty years go by with someone laying in your bed / Forty years of things you say you wish you’d never said / How hard would it have been to say some kinder words instead?” sings Griffin with stunning conviction. Regret seeps from those heart-rending lines, capped by the man’s admission that his house now “seems as empty as the inside of me.”
Griffin’s eye and ear for detail, and the Raymond Carver-like dignity she imparts to lives that others might dismiss as menial or mundane, are powerfully present in another song of loss, “Making Pies.” At a factory owned by Table Talk, which is an actual pie brand in New England, a long-term employee takes relief in repetitive work from memories flooding back on her, including those of a young sweetheart killed in war. “You could cry or die or just make pies all day,” sings Griffin, who gives this character the respect she deserves.
That understanding and compassion stem directly from the songwriter’s own background. The youngest of seven children born to an Irish father and a French-Canadian mother in a devout Catholic household that did not have a lot of money, Patty Griffin was a Pizzeria Uno waitress for five years and a telephone operator temp for two years before music became a calling she could finally make a living at.
At Pizzeria Uno, “we had to wear two watches — one with the time and the other with the time 20 minutes later so we could tell customers when their pizza would be ready,” she recalled in an interview. “Like we couldn’t add 20 to whatever the time was.”
Griffin doesn’t have to read Barbara Ehrenreich’s “Nickel and Dimed” book to recognize its chilling, enduring truths. She’s already confronted them firsthand. “If it weren’t for the publishing end of my career,” Griffin said, “I would be waiting on tables again.”
That’s a disturbing thought when you consider how skilled a vocalist she is. The Chieftains invited her to sing on tour with them and on their latest album, “Down the Old Plank Road,” where she performs “Whole Heap of Little Horses.” Recording that brooding beauty of an American lullaby with the Chieftains “totally hit the mark with my father,”
Griffin added proudly.
There are three cover songs on Griffin’s own CD that further demonstrate her range. “Mil Besos,” which translates as “1000 Kisses,” is her nervy entr