Silver Bell (Unreleased)

The story of Silver Bell as told by press clippings:

From the Nashville Rage – May 31, 2001

“Despite having a critically lauded second album, despite coming off a heralded slot opening for one of the hottest acts in the industry, and despite repeated rescheduling of the release of the follow-up project, Griffin’s now-former record label came to the conclusion all artists dread – that they ‘didn’t hear a single’ – and decided to shelve the project, titled Silver Bell.

“And the really sad thing? She’s been through pretty much the same situation already.

“Griffin’s debut recording, Living With Ghosts, was originally intended to sound very different than it turned out. A demo set of acoustic recordings of the songs on Ghosts got Griffin her deal with A&M Records back in 1996. She went into the studio with a producer and a band and kicked out an electrified version, at which point the Powers That Be at A&M kicked it back and refused to release it.

. . .

“Griffin got to make the record she wanted two years later with Flaming Red, an out-and-out rock project on which she teamed with Nashville producer/guitarist Jay Joyce. The songs were in-your-face both musically and topically, with tracks like Tony, Change and Mary making you think as much as Wiggley Fingers, Blue Sky and the title track make you rock out.

. . .

“Angry and frustrated with [the label's] actions, Griffin asked for and received a release from the label, but without the masters to Silver Bell.

“Griffin turned away requests for an interview, with representatives from her management company saying it was even difficult for them to talk with the singer-songwriter about the latest turns in her career.

“‘As far as record label horror stories go, mine was pretty mild,’ Griffin says with a laugh. The plot went this way: A few weeks after A&M released ’98’s ‘Flaming Red,’ the rocking counterpart to the ‘96 solo acoustic debut ‘Living With Ghosts,’ the label was swallowed whole by Universal Music. Griffin was shipped off to Interscope, which had been built on hard rock and gangsta rap. ‘The timing couldn’t have been worse,’ says manager Ken Levitan. ‘We were able to finally convince them to work one more single to radio.’

“Silver Bell . . . revealed an evolution in her personal development. The songs on Living With Ghosts had shown open wounds from her broken marriage. Those were still evident on Flaming Red, but they were healing with time and perspective, and the girl was bursting to discover a new life . . .. On Silver Bell, however, she subtly shifted her focus beyond herself, even to social commentary and thoughts of a higher power.”

“More bad luck came when Griffin delivered her next album, ‘Silver Bell,’ in the spring of 2000, just weeks after the huge international Vivendi conglomerate bought Universal. ‘When these corporations acquire other corporations they end up owing billions and billions of dollars,’ Griffin says. ‘They’re not gonna make that kind of money back with records by folks like me.’ (Griffin’s previous two albums sold in the 100,000-150,000 range). ‘Silver Bell,’ which included Griffin’s French Canadian mother on guest vocals, was returned to a heartbroken Griffin with a terse instruction: Write 10 new songs that could be played on the radio.

“’That was pretty suffocating because that’s not how I like to write songs,’ Griffin says. In the meantime, she had a financial windfall when the Dixie Chicks recorded her song ‘Let Him Fly’ on their 10 million-selling 1999 album ‘Fly.’  Touting Griffin as their favorite songwriter, the Chicks took the ruby-tressed songbird on tour. ‘It was a lot of fun hanging out with the Chicks,’ she says, ‘but not very musically satisfying playing in hockey arenas.’

“In March 2001, a year after ‘Silver Bell’ had been finished, Levitan had a meeting with Interscope brass, including head honcho Jimmy Iovine, that he says ‘just didn’t feel right,’ and soon he was negotiating a way out of Griffin’s contract. ‘The thing that no one would say, but I’d bet they were all thinking it, was that I’m 38 years old,’ Griffin says. ‘It’s a kids’ game now. and the feeling is that if I hadn’t made it by now, I wasn’t going to make it.’ As part of the agreement to let her go, Griffin would have to buy back the masters if she wanted to shop ‘Silver Bell’ to another label.

A much-buzzed-about artist made even hotter with her 1998 disc “Flaming Red,” Griffin suddenly found herself stuck in a frustrating major label limbo that lasted nearly four years.

“It was recorded in 2000,” she says of her still unreleased third album, “Silver Bell,” fourth if you include an earlier unreleased disc recorded around the time of “Living With Ghosts.” “It was accepted by the label that I ended up on after the first corporate takeover,” Griffin says. “Then the label was bought again, and I ended up with a new regime, and they told me that they did not like the record at all. My manager figured out a nice way to get me out of there without owing a lot of money.”

Griffin’s story is not unique, especially at a time when major labels seem increasingly desperate for coffer-filling hits.

“By the time the artist finally lands a label, they end up signing so much away, because they come from such a vulnerable place,” Griffin notes of the kind of draconian major-label contracts that often ironically prevent artists from releasing records at all.

“Every musician I know knows somebody who suffers from clinical depression, or knows someone who committed suicide, that had to deal with major labels. It’s just a problem of respect and honoring the person and what they’re trying to express.”

Freed from her conrtact, Griffin was one of the lucky ones, but the rejection still stung. “The sad part for me is that the dream is kind of dead,” she says with a sigh.

In the mid-1990s, Griffin was signed to the major label A&M on the basis of a spare, soulful demo tape. At the label’s request, she recorded a high-budget debut, but staffers “hated” it. Dejected and exhausted, Griffin asked A&M to release her solo acoustic demos as the finished album. The result was the critically acclaimed 1996 gem “Living With Ghosts.”

Griffin eventually established a great rapport with A&M, which released her textured, full-band album “Flaming Red” in 1998. Around this time, the label entered a chaotic period of corporate reshuffling, which hindered the marketing of her second disc. More bad luck came when Polygram, parent label of A&M, merged with Universal, effectively eliminating A&M.

In 2000, Griffin recorded another album, “Silver Bell,” but it remains unreleased. She has since parted ways with Universal, leaving that album in legal limbo. The disc contains “The Top of the World,” which is one of Griffin’s finest works and a highlight of her concerts.

Patty Griffin’s new album, “1000 Kisses,” is not just an artistic achievement. It’s a triumph that it was made at all.

Before producing the new CD “out of pocket,” and selling it to Dave Matthews’ label, ATO, Griffin endured painful and prolonged record label hassles. In 2000, for the second time in her short recording career, an album was fully produced, postponed and then never released.

She doesn’t take it personally. “I don’t think there’s any female my age at a major record label right now who’s having an easy time of it,” said Griffin, 38.

“They’ve geared their efforts to a younger age group. And if you don’t have platinum potential, forget it. They just don’t do what I do anymore. The structure of the major labels changed while I was there. And so did I,” said Griffin, who plays the Somerville Theatre tonight.

The lost CD, “Silver Bell,” was produced at Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studio in New Orleans. Griffin’s label, A&M, taken over by Interscope by that time, neither accepted nor rejected the effort. They just dawdled. For a year.

“Then they brought me to L.A. to tell me they didn’t like the record. They weren’t specific. I think they didn’t hear a hit. But they didn’t drop me, they wanted me to record something else. At that time, I owed them a lot of money and was not in position to argue. So I did try to do more work for them for a little while,” said Griffin, her small, shy voice little more than a mutter.

The new recordings did not proceed well, however. “So my manager managed to cut me a deal out of there,” she said.

In order to break her contract, Griffin was forbidden to release the recordings from New Orleans on another label. She can, however, re-record up to five of the lost album’s songs. “After five songs, for the privilege of re-recording my own work, I’ll have to pay them. That’s pretty standard and ridiculous record-contract bull,” she said.

Silver Bell also revealed an evolution in her personal development. The songs on Living With Ghosts had shown open wounds from her broken marriage. Those were still evident on Flaming Red, but they were healing with time and perspective, and the girl was bursting to discover a new life, even likening herself to the devilishly peripatetic character in Hans Christian Andersen’s Red Shoes. On Silver Bell, however, she subtly shifted her focus beyond herself, even to social commentary and thoughts of a higher power. The music still rocked, in some spots even harder than on Flaming Red; but there were also softer, acoustic tunes, and hints of hip-hop and Latin flavors.

When Griffin delivered Silver Bell to Interscope in the summer of 2000, company president Tom Wally told Griffin he liked it, he thought it was a quality record and he wanted to put it out, but…he didn’t hear a single. Griffin thought she did. “I mean, I don’t know what singles are,” she says. “I just hear catchy tunes and I go, ‘Okay, well, I’ve got a single.’ But apparently they hear thing differently.

“Then the quest for the single came. We tried to come up with songs that were singles.” She could at least take her time; Wally had also said that, so as not to get lost in the flood of bigger releases planned for holiday sales, the release should wait until early 2001. That delay, however, made it impossible to capitalize on Griffin’s back-to-back fall 2000 tours with the Dixie Chicks and EmmyLou Harris. Worse, as things turned out, Interscope was sold, and Wally left for another label.

In February 2001, the new regime flew Griffin to Los Angeles and pur her up at the Four Seasons Hotel. She wouldn’t get such royal treatment if they intended to drop her, right? She had some doubts. By that time, she says Silver Bell “was a massive, huge record and full of compromises, full of songs that I felt like were really not cutting it quality-wise, but they were what the people from the label [had] thought were good singles, so they stayed on the record.* And that’s the kind of thing that starts to happen when you’re on a label and people are really worried about money.” Indeed, those expense account lunches, let alone Four Seasons bills, do add up.

That she can now laugh about the ensuing meeting shows how much Griffin has grown. “They said. ‘Patty, we don’t like this record, and as a matter of fact, we don’t think you’ve really ever made a great record, so we would like to help you make another record.’ They pointed out a song that I had pitched for a single and they said, ‘We need about ten more of these, and we’ll put a record out for you.’

“There were three guys and I think that they were really trying. On the way out the door they handed me a record by U2, ‘Beautiful Day’, which isn’t a bad record, it’s just – I remember War. I was a kid when War came out, and I’d never heard anything like it before. And I thought that ‘Beautiful Day’ was a long way off from anything I wanted to do musically.”

Griffin went home and tried for a week to write singles. She even listened to U2’s album, but she says, “one day when I put it in, I just felt really sad after a couple of songs. I felt as though the record is beautiful, but it’s cold, and everything on the radio, even if it’s beautiful, right now, is cold. There are definitely exceptions to that, but generally speaking, that is where the radio leaves me, is cold.

I took it out and decided not to listen to it, and a few hours later I got a call from my manager. He asked me if I wanted to get off Interscope.”

She wonders, now, if all along she wasn’t being “mercy killed.” Griffin would lose Silver Bell in the deal, but the label wouldn’t hold her to her debt, which she says was “massive.” And she would be free. “First thing I did was go outside and jump up and down in my yard,” she says. “I was really, really, really, really happy.

“And then a couple of days later I just went ‘HEY! They can’t just let me go like that. I’m good!’ All this shit came up, you know – rejection, and nobody fought for me.”

Her response was to get right back up on the horse that threw her. Says her longtime guitarist Doug Lancio, “When she got out of the deal with Interscope, she called everyone in the band and told them the news, but in that same conversation, she asked if I just wanted to make a record with her over here in my basement. I thought it was kind of brave of her.” Griffin arrived on his Nashville doorstep one Thursday in April, and by Saturday night they had finished a record, with Lancio co-producing.

Tracks:

1 Little God 5:27
2 Boston 3:41
3 Perfect White Girls 3:41
4 Truth No. 2 4:31
5 What You Are 5:05
6 Silver Bell 2:50
7 Driving 4:21
8 Sooner or Later 3:44
9 Top of the World 5:56
10 Sorry and Sad 3:19
11 Making Pies 3:48
12 Mother of God 6:04
13 One More Girl 5:07
14 Standing 4:10