Griffin’s Smoky Folk and Gorgeous Intonations

‘Impossible Dream’ converts a folk non-believer — almost. By MAx BRETT

In order to be ethical, I feel that I should be completely clear about my prejudices.

To me folk is just above college a cappella in the hierarchy of music. That is to say, if all music were a city, folk music would be feces in the sewer below.

So when I slid Patty Griffin’s “Impossible Dream” into my laptop, I feared the worst. Demons of Joan Baez’s “Joe Hill” performance at Woodstock haunted me with the image of an irritating folksy style mixed with a juvenile social consciousness. That bare instrumentation and scattered hippy ideology usually makes me yearn for RZA or some equally harsh rapper.

But most prejudices are shaped by one bad experience. And as I was to learn, not all folk music is trash.

Folk music has, at points during its existence, mated with smarter, more honest country music, much to its benefit. And like Alison Krauss & Union Station, Griffin’s gorgeous, pure voice soars over the Americana-like sound her band creates. Her voice would sound equally appropriate in a county fair, a jazz club or a stadium arena.

Griffin has been lauded as one of the strongest singers to come out of the Boston folk scene in recent years, but to box her into the “folk” scene is unfair.

On the first track, “Love Throw a Line,” Griffin plows through a country song, her voice standing out at times and then receding into a rambling beat, establishing a tone that continues through the rest of the album.

By contrast, “Cold As It Gets” has a tiny acoustic guitar that sounds miles away from Griffin’s God-like evangelical voice, which explodes mournfully at points in the short, sad track. When I encounter a voice like this, single-handedly breathing life into each song, I almost feel like the album would be more effective with minimal accompaniment. Likewise, “Top Of The World” has the simplest strings, which touch off Griffin’s flaring, pretty intonations.

On “Kite Song,” Griffin’s vocals compete with a lingering piano and sea-sounding background singers. Complicating this clearly cluttered song are lyrics fit to make even the softest soul cringe, like “In the middle of the night/ We dream of a million kites/ Flying high above the sadness and the fear.” Similarly weak is “Rowing Song,” which has an attractive mix of muted trumpet and acoustic guitar, but is excruciating, lyrically speaking, with “As I row, row, row/ Going so slow, slow, slow.”

The album actually has contrasting styles, all of them with overtones of blues and bluegrass. Then there’s “Standing,” a sparkling combination of Brian Eno-esque soundscape, soul and spiritual. It’s beautiful — something that could erupt from a church on Sunday.

The chief strength of Impossible Dream is just how beautiful it sounds. Picking apart the simpler aspects of Griffin’s lyricism is easy, but the fiddle after her clear notes in “Useless Desires” contains enough sheer harmony to sustain interest. It’s also notable that Griffin allows her sound to develop over uncharacteristically long songs, drawing the listener in slowly, then shocking them with something indescribably beautiful.

But how much beauty can one person stand? There’s no grit, no edginess and no adventurous nature to the sound Griffin is manufacturing. Her detailed and poetic reminiscences, her pain and her melancholy are wrapped in such a joyful noise that it’s easy to get lost, or bored even, in a gallery of cutesy sound with little perceptible depth.

“Impossible Dream” does have a certain heartbreaking quality, though, established by excellent accompaniment for lyrics that at some points resonate as strongly as Griffin’s vocals. 

Medill sophomore Max Brett is a writer for PLAY. He can be reached at [email protected].