The Aurora Review
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Winter/Spring
2005 |
  2. Anyone who has ever listened to a Patty Griffin album, or a recent Dixie Chicks album for that matter, could never argue with Griffin’s songwriting ability. Griffin is best known for writing evocative, angry songs about lost love and gritty songs infused with social consciousness. Her latest, Impossible Dream, is based on broader observations about the human condition, grounded not in social inequality, but in the emotional struggles that bond us together as human beings. “The Kite Song” is the best example of this shift in Griffin’s songwriting: “In the middle of the night we try and try with all our might to light a little light down here/In the middle of the night we dream of a million kites flying high above the sadness and the fear.” We are all bonded by the struggle against the darkness and the fight to bring a little light into the world, according to Griffin. “Nobody knows knows knows/so many things things so/so out of range/sometimes so strange/sometimes so sweet/sometimes so lonely,” she sings softly in “The Rowing Song,” a poetic sea chanty in which rowing is a metaphor for life. Impossible Dream closes with “Icicles,” a melodic folk song about the need for love and the desire to hold onto the brief moments when love was given and returned. At times cautiously optimistic, at times cynical, Impossible Dream is a folk-pop masterpiece – a journey of the human struggle to find love and light.
A Boot and A Shoe Consisting almost exclusively of acoustic guitar and percussion, Sam Phillips’ simultaneously melodic and minimalist A Boot and a Shoe is pure masterpiece. An album about lust and heartache, A Boot and a Shoe paints an impressionistic portrait of a woman in the process of reevaluating her life in the midst of a breakup. With intensely personal lyrics, Phillips unearths some fundamental truths about the psychology of personal loss. The album begins with “How to Quit,” an ode to the difficulties of having a relationship in the 21st century, when so many of us have baggage that makes us distrustful of others: “I was broken when you got me, with holes that would let the light through.” “Reflecting Light,” a piano and guitar folk ballad, concentrates on the exhaustion that comes with experiencing great loss. “Give up the ground under your feet/Hold onto nothing for good/Turn and run at the mean dogs chasing you/Stand alone and misunderstood,” Phillips sings in a half-whisper, half-croon. Phillips’ voice is a thing of beauty, equally capable of a sneer or a sigh or both in the same breath. She delivers each song with a whispery vibrato that heightens the sexual innuendo already present in her poetic lyrics. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the evocative, seductive “Red Silk Five,” when she sings of a lusty relationship that is “everything I wanted, nothing I needed.” A Boot and a Shoe is more than a collection of love songs – it is a deep exploration of the difficulties of relationships and offers a lucid view of the female psyche in the face of loss. |
