Nanci Griffith: Winter Marquee : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Nanci Griffith picked up a well-deserved Grammy in 1993 for her exemplary collection of contemporary folk covers, Other Voices, Other Rooms, but it's been all downhill since then, with each successive release (including last year's mushy A Clock Without Hands) failing to measure up to the magic of her landmark album. That slide officially stops with Winter Marquee, a live album capturing one perfect evening of song spanning her entire career. Like Live at the Old Quarter and Keepers, a pair of epochal live albums by Griffith's Texas contemporaries Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark, Winter Marquee succeeds as both the perfect primer for newcomers and, for veteran fans both faithful and jaded, a reaffirmation of why she was worth caring about in the first place. Griffith has always shined brightest live, where what in the studio sounds precocious and twee comes off as winningly casual and real (like her pixie twang of a voice), and her songs -- be they originals like "Gulf Coast Highway" or covers like Bob Dylan's "Boots of Spanish Leather" -- shimmer in a way even her best recordings only hint at. Consequently, this isn't her best album since Other Voices, Other Rooms -- it's her best since her last live album, 1988's One Fair Summer's Evening.

RICHARD SKANSE
(SEPTEMBER 25, 2002)