Patty Griffin Delivers Impassioned Performances of Her Americana Songs on a 2007 "Live at the Artsts' Den" Show She Considered Good Enough to Release

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching the film noir Moonrise on Turner Classic Movies on Friday, June 26, I waited almost an hour during which my husband Charles came home from work and I put on a PBS music show called Live from the Artists’ Den featuring singer-songwriter Patty Griffin. The show was copyrighted 2007 even though the series didn’t start airing on PBS stations until the following year. Griffin liked the show enough that she released it as a live CD in 2008, and it was quite impressive even though I tend to get Patty Griffin confused with the more country-style artist Kathy Griffin. Patty Griffin is a highly talented singer-songwriter who’s flirted with a wide range of styles, from traditional gospel to “Americana” to the kind of women’s folk music exemplified in the 1970’s by the late Laura Nyro and the still-living Carole King. Since Live from the Artists’ Den, unlike Live at the Belly Up or The Kate, does not offer chyrons at the start of the songs telling you what they’re called, I scrawled out the titles as best I could aside from the two songs that Griffin actually introduced by name, “Burgundy Shoes” and “Up to the Mountain” (inspired, she said, by Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last speech, in which he said, “I have been to the mountaintop”), and guessed them. The track listing at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patty_Griffin:_Live_from_the_Artist%27s_Den includes 14 to 16 songs (depending on whether you count the standard version or the one with two bonus tracks from the iTunes store) while she only performed 11 on the TV version, and they aren’t in the same order either, but here goes. She opened on acoustic guitar with her basic four-piece lineup (Doug Lancio on electric guitar, Bryn Davies on acoustic bass, and Michael Longoria on drums and a lot of elaborate ancillary percussion) with “Stay on the Ride.” Then she brought in a string quartet (Maxim Moston and Antoine Silverman, violins; David Gold, viola; and Jane Scarpantoni, cello) and J. D. Foster on electric bass for “Burgundy Shoes” before sending all her bandmates away and performing the next two songs, “You Never Get What You Want” and “Moon Song,” alone with just her voice and acoustic guitar.

Frankly, I thought the three she played on her own, those two and a later one called “Sweet Lorraine” (not the 1928 standard by Cliff Burwell and Mitchell Parrish which became Nat “King” Cole’s star-making hit when he recorded it first in 1940 for Decca and then in 1945 for Capitol), were her best. Griffin taped this show on February 6, 2007 just after the release of her album Children Running Through on the independent ATO Records label. She made an interesting comment in one of the interstital interviews these shows are almost always saddled with to the effect that in her early days she’d been told to sing out and sing loudly. Later she’d calmed down and started singing more softly and soulfully, but now she was going back to writing and singing loud songs again. Among her songs on Live at the Artists’ Den – one of whose gimmicks was to film the artists in unusual settings, here a Gothic ex-synagogue turned cultural center in New York City – were “No Bad News,” “When It Don’t Come Easy,” and a quite powerful song whose title I wrote down as “Just Before the Flood Comes.” Later she did “To the Top of the World” and “Oh, Heavenly Day” (which she identified as her first love song and said it was written for her dog). I loved the way she delicately balanced her set between loud, aggressive rockers and more plaintive singer-songwriter songs in the Nyro/King manner. Her voice throughout was solid and forthright, and on at least one song she played piano while on others she had the backing of veteran rock keyboardist Ian McLagan (1945-2014) of both the original Small Faces and its later iteration, Rod Stewart’s backing band Faces. Patty Griffin has had an up-and-down career, originally signing with A&M Records in 1996 only to be fired by them after two released albums and a third, Silver Rose, which they turned down and didn’t put out officially until 2013, though bootleg copies existed and leaked out before that. Then she signed with ATO and stayed with them until the Children Running Through album, following which she went with even smaller indie labels (Credential, New West) before starting to release her recordings herself, distributing through a company called Thirty Tigers, with Servant of Love in 2015.