If I’m being presumptuous, it’s only because an album of this caliber rarely comes along. More than a decade later, after the record was egregiously discarded during the wake of a merger between A&M Records and Universal, Griffin’s masterpiece will finally receive the widespread critical acclaim it so rightfully deserved in 2000. What once had vanished as if it had never been recorded, now has been given life again. Silver Bell fills in the blanks between the overproduced, but incendiary Flaming Red and the raw beauty of 1000 Kisses. Thirteen years later, Patty’s long “lost” record Silver Bell has been released and the earliest incarnation of “Top of the World” can now be heard in all its emotionally resonant glory.
It was made famous by the Dixie Chicks and eventually ended up on Griffin’s album Impossible Dream, but the powerful original feels like the definitive version, containing a ghostly fragment of “J’irai la voir un jour”, a lullaby her grandmother used to sing to her as a child. Aching with introspective fragility, the song conveys the regrets of a man who died and is looking down from above, contemplating the errors of his life. Within the lyrical context of “Top of the World”, the masterful singer-songwriter Patty Jean Griffin probably never expected to write a chorus that would reflect the fate of the album it would first be featured on. There’s a whole lot of singing that’s never gonna be heard, disappearing every day without so much as a word somehow.
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