Song spinning

Colvin makes good with the bad times

by Joan Anderman

I've been thinking about the singer/songwriter, who is back in good grace with the fickle gods of mainstream popular-music culture (Jewel, Sarah McLachlan). Who gets to be in that club? Why is Trent Reznor -- who writes songs and sings them -- not a singer/songwriter, but Shawn Colvin -- who holds down the same job -- is? It's not a matter of amps or attitude; contemplative souls are loud and pissed-off too. The difference is that musicians like Colvin and Freedy Johnston and Patty Griffin -- who played a sold-out show at the Orpheum last Friday -- devote their creative energies to building three-minute miniatures of a human condition that's painstakingly reflected in the messed-up poetry of their own lives, without the smoke-machine theatricality and image mongering.

Count Patty Griffin among the loud and pissed-off. Scratching at her acoustic guitar as if it were the guy in the songs, she was a one-woman thrash-folk juggernaut, her strings and her heart breaking with about the same frequency. Griffin's voice flies clear and hard from some fiery pit inside of her, and she wrapped it with mesmerizing grace around the tortured grunge of "Every Little Bit" and a throw-in-the-towel blues "Let Him Fly." Both songs are from her debut CD, Living with Ghosts (A&M), which she recorded in a rented room in South Boston and a kitchen in Nashville. Two new songs, an edgy folk-rocker and a bitter waltz, rounded out a compelling, too-short set.

Freedy Johnston needed a hit of whatever Griffin is on. The scrappy energy of his latest alterna-folk-pop CD, Never Home (Elektra), was nonexistent, subsumed in equal measure by his lackluster band and the inexplicably awful sound. Hooks that would make the Gin Blossoms weep -- on the Yes-meets-Paul Westerberg rocker "One More Thing To Break"; "Something's Out There," a graduate thesis from the Elvis Costello school of smart-and-clever songwriting; and the ultra-catchy pop anthem "I'm Not Hypnotized" -- were hopelessly muddied, and Johnston's already thin voice was lost almost entirely.

And then there was headliner Shawn Colvin, as elegant a confessor as her guru, Joni Mitchell. Although I continually battle the notion that suffering breeds artistic inspiration, Colvin's new A Few Small Repairs (Columbia) -- arriving on the heels (or wings, as it were) of big emotional fractures -- is the best thing she's done. Colvin's arc as a songwriter has led to a brilliant distillation of the sparkling folk-pop first heard in 1990 on her (well-deserved) Grammy-winning debut, Steady On (Columbia). Despair and disillusionment -- fallout of the failed relationship -- is stripped bare and set to a rootsy, beautifully elemental sound.

Colvin came out swinging with her two current singles, "Sunny Came Home," a haunting parable about torching the past, literally and figuratively ("Get the kids and bring a sweater/Dry is good and wind is better/Count the years, you always knew it/Strike a match, go on and do it"), and "Get Out of This House," a folk-rock tune as forceful as its message ("You act like a baby, you talk like a fool/Get out of this house"). Sometimes her melodies are so delicate they seem spun from air, especially on "Trouble," a stark embrace of her attraction to calamity, and "Ricochet in Time" and "Shotgun Down the Avalanche," two gems from the first album. Here Colvin turned phrases with such soft, uncomplicated inflection that it sounded as if she were speaking song.

Her good spirits have evidently survived the emotional train wrecks. "I'd like to do another disaster song. They keep getting bigger," she smirked, introducing "The Fall of Rome." And she showed true grit covering Prince's "Holy River," a lilting, gospel-flavored homage to matrimony. The girl knows how to purge. She also knows how to play her guitar like crazy, a talent that tends to go overlooked. Her five-piece band had chops to match -- light-handed and crisp and quirky as her music.

"Armed with just a will and then this love for singing songs," Colvin sings in "If I Were Brave." Alone at the piano for this wrenching ballad, she was the very picture of her song: an artist with less to prove and more to show in spite of, and of course because of, all the trouble.