Nanci Griffith was sure she wouldn't be around to see the domestic release of her new album, Hearts In Mind -- around meaning on U.S. soil. A singer and songwriter who has long worn her lefty politics on her sleeve and skirt, too, she had sworn if George Bush was elected president, she would leave the country. The prospect of living through four more years of his administration, she said, was too painful to contemplate.
But her friend Brenda Lee convinced her to stay. "She said we need you, we need your voice, we need the dissent to be there," Griffith explained. "And she was right. I'll have a place to run away to when I get to the point where I feel my head is going to explode. But I'm going to stay and keep saying what I'm saying and believe there is hope."
Griffith knows a thing or two about the power of hope. During the mid-'90s, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, then thyroid cancer, and beat them both. In the aftermath, she said, her approach to life changed a bit. "I learned not to put off happiness until tomorrow, to go after it," she says. "I think that's been the major difference in my life, and I also think it's kept me healthy."
Having recorded nearly two dozen albums since emerging from the Austin, Texas, scene a quarter-century ago, Griffith has taken on the mantle of distinguished artist. She is beloved by her fans for her personal reflections on love lost and found, and for her politically tinged songs. Some of them document her travels to places such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Kosovo and Angola on behalf of groups including the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (her ex-husband, singer-songwriter Eric Taylor, fought in Vietnam) and the Campaign for a Landmine Free World. A former schoolteacher, she has held onto the instructive side of her personality in her art and in her relations with her followers.
Hearts In Mind was released in England four months ahead of its February 1 domestic release to coincide with Griffith's fall tour abroad. She's on a new label, New Door, which is aligned with one of her former companies, MCA, via Universal Music. The album, her first studio effort in four years, straddles the new and the familiar. It's the first one Griffith has produced herself (in collaboration with Pat McInerney), and it features new wrinkles, including the use of backup singers (she usually does her own harmony vocals) and the employment of Keith Carradine, whom she met on the set of the forthcoming independent movie Our Very Own.
True to form, Griffith mixes songs about love and family and place, draws upon her roots in folk and country, offers new songs of her own and interprets tunes by artists she admires, throws in literary allusions, flexes her feminism -- and, yes, most definitely, vents her anti-war feelings.
I. ART AND POLITICS WALK HAND IN HAND
NO DEPRESSION: On the first song on the new album, "Before" [written by Griffith and Le Ann Etheridge], you sing, "Now everything is twilight/It's a time too dark to see." Many Americans were feeling that following the September 11 attacks, which inspired another song on the album, Julie Gold's "Mountain Of Sorrow". Are things still dark for you?
NANCI GRIFFITH: Oh, yes. I try not to let it overwhelm me, but there is an extreme amount of anxiety. This is a very, very dark time in American history. What we've done in Iraq is devastating, devastating to the whole world, not just for our nation. For me as a pacifist, the war in Iraq is just overwhelming. We as a great nation should be more evolved. We should be out there making peace, out there trying to promote peace, because it just can't go on this way. It's all very sad and troubling.
ND: As a member of Music Row Democrats, the coalition of Nashville musicians and music business people who worked to get John Kerry elected -- and, in the process, puncture the right-wing image country musicians have for many people -- you have to be extremely disappointed the presidential election went the way it did. But did something good come out of that movement nonetheless?
NG: I think so. I think a lot of people came out of their liberal closet and said it's OK to be a liberal, that it's not a bad word. And I think that's going to continue to happen. I don't think we're going to go away. I think we're gonna stick around and make a difference in 2006 with midterm elections.
ND: The Dixie Chicks debacle was the most notorious recent example of what can happen to popular musicians who make unpopular political statements. But there were other cases of artists facing fans who wanted them to stick to the music and leave the politics to someone else. Linda Ronstadt got kicked out of a Las Vegas hotel for being critical of Bush. You've always been pretty outspoken from the stage. How did you feel about this trend?
NG: Well, first of all, I don't dictate to my audience. I don't walk out there and preach to them. All I told them was you have to vote, go vote. But look, art and politics walk hand in hand. We learned that from Picasso, we learned that from all artists in history, and nobody's going to silence us.
But, you know, they're not really calling for the Nanci Griffiths of the music world to shut up, and they certainly don't want the Toby Keiths of this world to shut up. It all depends on who you're talking about. I try to deal with things that disappoint me, with the horrors of the war in Iraq and the terrible situation we've gotten ourselves into there, with as much respect and humor as possible, and I think that keeps me grounded.
ND: Do you think women artists have drawn nastier responses for speaking out than men with similar views?
NG: I think this kind of boorish, childish response cuts wider than that. But in the end, it had to do more with a giant radio chain [Clear Channel] pursuing an ill-advised agenda than anything else. The whole pop scene right now, it's just as fluffy as it was when I was a teenager. I don't think it's ever gonna change. Pop music when I was a teen had that other side of it -- it had Jackson Browne and other artists who were making a difference in expressing these important things.
ND: Another song on Hearts In Mind, "Big Blue Ball Of War", which you've been performing for a while, is marked by angry anti-war sentiment -- not to mention anti-male feelings. "Almost a century, the blood has flowed," you sing, "We've killed our men of peace around this ball, and refused to hear their ghosts." And yet, musically, it carries you along in an almost chipper state.
NG: It's a serious song, a bloody song. The feelings expressed in that song are very important to me. But there's also hope in that last verse. ["A reformation might just save us all/A voice of harmony and open heart/Where the women teach the song"]. If there's no hope at the end of it, there's no point in writing it.
ND: You performed last year in Hanoi, which is evoked on your new song "Old Hanoi". What was that like, and had things changed there since the last time you visited?
NG: Oh, it was wonderful. It was just terrific. It was the first time I did a performance there where the minister of information didn't require every lyric to every song I was going to perform. I also found my CDs bootlegged in the market. I was flattered; I wasn't insulted at all. I got to perform with the Vietnamese National Chamber Orchestra. That was quite a moving experience. Even though some of the orchestra members didn't speak English, they still understood what I was singing about.
II. MY CAREER WOULD HAVE BEEN A WHOLE DIFFERENT BALLGAME HAD I MOVED TO NEW YORK
ND: You've been making albums for a long time, but Hearts In Mind is the first one you've produced yourself. How did that come about and what did it mean in terms of how you recorded the songs?
NG: Recording and listening to my last album, Winter Marquee, which was a live album, I just felt, you know, that this was a kind of hallmark of a phase in my career. I wanted to move to another phase. I didn't want to change the way I sounded, and I certainly couldn't change my voice because it's so identifiable. But I was writing again, and I really wanted to capture what I was feeling here in my life, having entered my nifty 50s. I went in every day with the attitude of, well, if anything was out of my realm, Pat [McInerney, who co-produced] would do it, and vice versa. And if we lost our way, Peter Collins and Greg Ladanyi had agreed to take the wheel. They were waiting for that phone call and would come in and help us.
One of my conscious decisions was that though I have always done my own backing vocals, my own harmonies, I didn't want to do that on this project. I wanted my vocals just to be solo, just like I was behind the wheel solo as a producer. I brought in some wonderful singers to do the backing vocals. I really like the sound of it. It really puts my voice in its own individual space and makes it a lot more personal. I think even though it is personal doing your own backing vocals, it just sounds more personal with my voice right there and not a clutter of voices.
ND: You appeared on Jimmy Buffett's smash 2004 album, License To Chill, so it makes sense that he would return the favor by appearing on your record [Buffett is featured on "I Love This Town", written by Clive Gregson]. But how the heck did Keith Carradine end up co-writing as well as singing with you on "Our Very Own"? The last he was heard from him as a musician -- aside from playing a former pop star in Samuel Fuller's unseen swan song, Street Of No Return -- was doing "I'm Easy" in Robert Altman's Nashville. That was a long time ago.
NG: My niece is a makeup artist. She was working on a movie they were filming in Tennessee called Our Very Own, and she invited me to go down there to Shelbyville, have dinner with the producer and director and crew. I got down there and Keith was in the movie, along with Cheryl Hines [Larry David's wife on "Curb Your Enthusiasm"] and Allison Janney [of "The West Wing"]. It was incredible meeting all these people.
After meeting Keith, I told him I really loved the script of the movie. What did he think about co-writing something with me? He said, "You'd really want to write something with me?" I said yeah, so when I was in Los Angeles about a month later, he came over to my hotel and we wrote "Our Very Own", just a beautiful song. He had never co-written before, but he didn't walk into the room with any kind of agenda. He was very easily manipulated.
ND: You've moved around among a bunch of labels, including Rounder and Elektra and MCA. Tell us about New Door.
NG: Well, it was founded by Bob Mercer. I'm the third artist they've signed. They've also got Tears For Fears and Joe Cocker. The main focus in on artists who have longevity and have a good following who have been somewhat overlooked in the past few years.
ND: Do you feel overlooked?
NG: Yeah, I do. Certainly not by my wonderful fans. Not in terms of being able to tour. I've done well. But it just seems like there haven't been any Grammy nominations in a while and, you know, I've done projects like Blue Roses From The Moon and Clocks Without Hands. I love those projects and they just garnered very little attention here in the U.S.
ND: What was it that inspired you, back in 1985, to move to Nashville from Austin, where you grew up, established yourself as an artist, and still have a strong following?
NG: Actually, I was intending on moving to New York. On the way, I stopped in Nashville for the mixing of Last Of The True Believers, one of two albums I recorded there at Jack Clement's studio, and got a call that the apartment I had subletted in New York wasn't available. The person who lived there decided not to leave New York. So I had no place to live. A friend handed me the classifieds and said go out and find a place here.
I loved the whole New York scene. I have so many friends up there. I had been going there back and forth since 1981, so it seemed a reasonable thing to move there. But things didn't work out that way. I settled in Nashville instead and absolutely love it here. My career would have been a whole different ballgame had I moved to New York.
ND: Do you miss Austin?
NG: I miss the food.
ND: But not, I assume, some of the writers. You were involved in an epic feud with some of them. They wrote bad things about you and you said bad things about them in interviews and things escalated from there. What was that about?
NG: I have never figured out what that was about. There were a couple of writers who decided they were gonna just level me, and I never understood why and I never really got it. It was really baffling for me. That's my hometown. Part of it is that Austin has a certain amount of competitiveness among artists and among journalists. That doesn't exist in Nashville, where there's a really tight-knit community. Folks are really supportive of one another. There are so many great artists in Austin who have never gotten out of Austin, and that is always difficult. You can be totally famous in Austin, but if you drive to Dallas, no one's heard of you. Well, there's a certain resentment for anyone who leaves Austin and makes it elsewhere.
I think that a lot of the conflict that went on with these two journalists was the fact that I had left and made it. I was playing the Albert Hall, I was playing Carnegie Hall. But that's all over with. I have so many dear friends in Austin. I'm going down to South by Southwest this year. I haven't been there in three years. The Crickets are receiving a lifetime achievement award and I'm going to help honor them.
[One of the writers involved in the feud, Austin American-Statesman critic Michael Corcoran, said via e-mail that it started with a freelance magazine piece he wrote on singer-songwriters from Texas breaking stereotypes in country music: "It was very flattering except where I criticized Nanci's band as 'Nashville hacks' and another where I insinuated that she's the type to get married in a vintage white Victorian dress."]
III. EVERYONE HAS A DIFFERENT WAY OF DEALING WITH ILLNESS
ND: Before Bette Midler had a hit with "From A Distance", which Julie Gold wrote, you scored with it first in the U.K. Is it true it didn't get released in America?
NG: Yes. The head of radio at the label wouldn't release it as a single for me because she said Nanci Griffith's voice hurt people's ears and Americans would not understand the song. "From A Distance" was a big hit for me in the U.K. in 1987. It made my career in Europe, in the U.K., in Ireland. The first time I went to Ireland for an "Austin City Limits"-type TV show, when I walked out, people rose to their feet. I thought they were leaving. I didn't know anybody would know who I was. But they broke out into sustained applause. It was incredible.
There are wonderful audiences over there, and they're not fickle. They don't go away. They really follow your career. They're ready to hear your next project. They don't want to hear you repeat yourself. Don Williams is a huge star over there and has been for years.
ND: How did you cope with your illness, and what impact did it have on your songwriting?
NG: Everyone has a different way of dealing with illness. I kept working all throughout. I really got impatient with it, I think, when I had to take six weeks off for radiation treatment. I was so used to being on the road all the time, and it slows you down. I made some changes and adjustments in that time, and that impatience sometimes came out in my writing.
ND: You say your positive thinking helped you through.
NG: Yes, I think it did. But, you know, Jimmy Griffin died the other day. He was a singer and songwriter for Bread. He was such a positive person, a very secure person, and he just went so quickly. The last time I heard him sing was on Memorial Day. He was diagnosed with throat cancer a few days after that. You would think all the positive things he did, and living his life in such a wonderful way, giving people such beauty, would mean Jimmy Griffin would not have died. But a lot of things go into the mix.
ND: On "Beautiful", a song about your stepfather, you break things up with some garrulous bursts of scat. Is there a jazz singer in your closet champing at the bit to get out?
NG: Oh, well, my stepfather played piano in the Woody Herman band in the '40s and '50s, and that was my vain effort to pay tribute to jazz. Ella Fitzgerald said scatting is like standing onstage naked. You might even get embarrassed if you decided to scat in the shower. I'm not very good at it, and I don't think I'm getting any better at it. But it's so much fun and it always gets a great laugh. I really love this song. It gets the best response of anything we're performing live -- standing ovations.
A lot of people want to express to their step parents how much they have meant to them. My stepfather is a wonderful, vibrant, brilliant 82-year-old man who still gets up every morning and plays the piano. He loves the song. He's just so proud of it. It's so weird to think that when I first came to Nashville and met this songwriter named Tom Littlefield, who I wrote many songs with over the years and became great buddies -- I didn't know for several years that he is Woody Herman's grandson. It was like working our way back into a circle.
ND: As an established artist, you've had encounters with a lot of younger singers and songwriters. Have you been in a position where you've been able to mentor them?
NG: I hope I have. I'm such a believer in Elizabeth Cook; she is just the most talented and beautiful artist. She's a Grand Ole Opry star, but has not been able to break out of that. She looks like she should sound like Faith Hill, but in reality, she's this generation's Loretta Lynn. I just hope my support of her helps to get her name out to my type of audience. And Mary Gauthier, who will open our shows on the west coast, is just absolutely brilliant. It's great being around artists like her. No matter how down you're feeling, she lifts you right up.
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