Patty Griffin.

Patty Griffin sings from her soul.  You would know it even if she sang in Portuguese because of the way you can hear her guts coming through the sound of her voice.  Her music moves my spirit in a way that no other music ever has.  It is full of her deepest appetites and her simplest stories and to listen is to quench some unidentified hope for sweet, sweet music.

Her songs are honey in this fall season; her strumming is the perfect soundtrack for the rustling leaves and her voice sounds the way the rust treetops turn bronze in the five o'clock hour when the light is most scintillating.  She has wrapped her voice around the essence of autumn.  And like fall, when everything is so beautifully dying so that it can spring up later and begin again, Patty narrates the reality of life--all of its death and living and struggling and breathing.

Fall has a bewitching power over me.  The sky is almost the bluest blue that can be found outside of poetry and the way that the afternoon light pushes through the cracks of the leaves that canopy across the streets makes me forget where I am.  I could live with this forever.  And as I have found myself lately at a loss for words, Ms. Patty's folk songs seem to be the solution.