PureX
Veteran Member
I believe he has always claimed that it just came to him. Way back when he was a kid living in a small town in Canada, he had a sort of vision of what his life would be, including being a kind of songwriting spokesman for a generation, and he followed it pretty much without question. And it's more or less how his life turned out. People who knew him back in the early days in New York thought he was a bit of an oddball, a kind of periferal hanger-on type character, but mostly that was because he felt he knew what he was meant to become, and he was trying to figure out how to become it. He hung around and watched and learned, and eventually, something "clicked" inside him and the songs began to roll out.ChrisP said:
It's a pretty interesting story. But then I've found that when I listen to the stories of many such artists, they're all pretty interesting.
I like Patty Griffin's story. She grew up in an Irish Catholic home in Maine, and had listened to her mother sing (very well, according to Patty) while she did housework. And because of her Catholic upbringing, she had come to believe as a little girl that when people sing, angels sing to us through them. So for all of Patty's childhood, she listend to angels sing to her through her mother's voice.
She had no idea of or intention to become a singer or songwriter, and she was an intensely shy and timid person. She left Maine and moved to Florida, and ended up in some sort of bad relationship, that may have resulted in her being hit. Whatever it was, it caused her to take a close look at herself and she made up her mind then and there that she wasn't going to let her fear rule her for the rest of her life, as she felt it had up until then.
Soon she's up in Cambridge, Mass., and determined that she wanted to write a song and sing it in public as a way of overcoming her own shyness. She asked a friend who was in a well known professional band at that time to help her to play the guitar better (she mostly played piano, but couldn't drag a piano to an open mic night). He understood what she was trying to do and offered to help.
The first time he heard her play and sing his jaw dropped through the floor. He said later in interviews that he had never seen anything like it. Basically, the Patty Griffin he heard that day was the Patty Griffin we hear today. She came right out of the box that way both as a singer and a songwriter. She still had to overcome her shyness and fear to get up on stage, but her voice and her songwriting were awesome, and people who saw her in her first performances all say the same thing - that they were awe struck.
I watched her get up on stage in Chicago in front of 800 very impatient and well-oiled (with alcohol) people and the moment she began to sing (without the band, just her and her guitar) you could hear a pin drop. Before the song was over people were wiping tears from their eyes - not because it was a sad song, but because what they heard was so honest and beautiful.
There is something truly magical about art, especially in the medium of music.
