To say that listening to Patty Griffin's Impossible Dream is a
pleasure is like describing The Passion of the Christ as a high old
time at the movies. Griffin's songs are potent enough to make your
bones ache. WIth one wave of her hand she brands you with an album's
worth of pain, whispered out (or screamed out) by wounded souls fresh
from losing wrestles with God or with fortune or with high school or
with forty-year marriages. With another wave of her hand she fills you
with love for those same poor souls. If you've ever been racked with
sorrow and desperate with love at the same time you know what it is to
hover breathlessly under the gift of her songwriting. Through that
lens, human beings are fragile, precious, and tossed by awesome forces.
The blue-collar, small-town archetypes that inhabit a Patty Griffin
record are part of a mythology as rich and as primal as scripture.
It's been that way, for me at least, since a borrowed copy of Griffin's
1,000 Kisses wore utterly out on my watch.

As such, I figured I knew what to expect from Impossible Dream, her
latest release---but I wound up surprised. The first cut, "Love Throws
a Line," is a polished, generously produced grace anthem,
uncharacteristically confessing that "just before the flood comes, just
before the night falls/ just before the blood runs into the valley/
just before my eyes go, just before we can't go no further/Love throws
a line to you and me." That tune is followed up by the spooky, "Cold as
it Gets," with a rich melody that sounds like it's a hundred years old,
and lyrics like "To the end of the earth I search for your face, the
one who laid all of our beauty to waste/threw our hope into Hell and
our children to the fire/ but I am the one who crawled through the
wire." Bone-chilling. So I'm two songs in, and I'm thinking, "what do
you know! A Patty Griffin record!" But that's it. Two terrific
songs. From there, the album almost instantly degenerates into a sort
of pensive grogginess; all brooding with no handles to hang onto.
"Rowing Song" ends before it's begun. "Mother of God" is about four
minutes too long. The piano work, when it's there, is elementary and
uninteresting. The horns are distracting. And it kind of chaps me,
because I was utterly ready to be torn limb from limb.

The album is not less poignant than any of Griffin's better stuff,
necessariily. It's just less focused; less tangible; less rooted in
solidly compelling musical ideas. Patty Griffin's discography is
excellent to say the least, and so far consists of a pendulum that
swings between the skeletal Living with Ghosts and the meandering
Impossible Dream (of course, Flaming Red and A Kiss in Time are
in there as well). It's difficult not to compare either album to
1,000 Kisses (her best work by some margin). That album is the
center of the swing, where the line is as perpendicular to the sky as
it is to the ground. It balances hooky grooves with rich imagery.
Plenty of wingspan, but plenty to hold onto as well. Patty's in
control, and she cuts like a surgeon. On the early side of the swing,
Living with Ghosts (with a few notable track exceptions) screams so
hard that it hurts to listen to. On the later side, Impossible Dream
(with a few notable track exceptions) is Patty Griffin doing Patty
Griffin.

That said, it's important to note that Impossible Dream is merely the
least of the albums of a songwriter whose records are uniformly
brilliant. It's the Connecticut Yankee to the Huckleberry Finn of
1,000 Kisses. Dream is worth paying full-price for, for sure. If
you're a fan, you gotta have it (I'm a fan, and I have it). You'll
listen to it again and again (I listen to it again and again). But get
1,000 Kisses first. It's a necessary preamble for all Yankees.