City Songs: Boston

Patty Griffin, Boston

[purchase Flaming Red]
[purchase other Patty Griffin CDs]

I went back to Boston, back to the city you were lost in...

Silver Bell was supposed to be singer-songwriter Patty Griffin's third album, but it got lost in the shuffle when A&M got bought out by Interscope. Shame, that. Many of the songs on Silver Bell were subsequently rerecorded for other albums, and a few became hits for such luminaries as the Dixie Chicks, but this never-released song is one of her hardest rockers; it is both a tour of my childhood haunts and a tour of my adolescent rock-and-roll angst.

Purchase link goes to Flaming Red, Griffin's underrated (if overproduced) second album, which shares the same diverse grungefolk sensibility as much of Silver Bell. You can find a half-dozen folk and country covers of Patty Griffin songs here.