If you're curious and have never heard her, this is the best place to start

Nanci Griffith is easily in the top 5 singer/songwriters and is probably the highest rated female—depending on mood, she is top of the top. What I value in her is an emotional intensity and intimacy that is her bread and butter. Few singer/songwriters trawling the same area mix their actual voice with the songwriting ‘voice’ so seamlessly.

Flyer is unique in Ms. Griffith’s oeuvre. Previous recordings have contained songs that invite, if not require, a shared intimacy where what she sings brings up the sorer spots in our psychical past (to mix a metaphor, this melancholy prompting can be like scratching a mosquito bite: you kind of wish you didn’t have to, but some strange pleasure rides along the scratch). Flyer is more biographical where we are invited to listen to her searching through her own past and displaying it for listeners.

There is only one song on the recording that I don’t care for much (I will cover that in a minute) and I think the song order doesn’t take advantage of the emotional stage Ms. Griffith sets—other than that I have no gripes or complaints.

The first and second songs should have been “These Days in an Open Book” and “Time of Inconvenience.” The first song that contains these lyrics: “These days my life is an open book missing pages I can’t seem to find; these days your face in my memory’s a folded hand of grace against these times.” The song is about remembering a former love and the effect this memory has on her present. It sets the mood of the recording better than the first, eponymous song does. The Indigo Girls, among others, sing backup on this song and start, almost atacata, the song that follows, “A Time of Inconvenience.”

This song is a bit problematic because it is not directly attached to the idea of love lost, love not found, love teetering, or an independence and strength learned because of these run-ins with love. “Open Book” ends with the word “time,” and as you might imagine, “Inconvenient Time” begins with the same word. The song is not so much protest as it is a lament about the conditions as Ms. Griffith sees the current society: “This is a time of greed and power; this is a time that I wish was not mine.” If it weren’t a catchy and ironically upbeat song, it would lean far more to the old-fashioned folk protest song. Instead it is more like a musical op-ed piece.

The recording is balanced towards the love lost and independence learned than any of the previous recordings:

“Don’t Forget about Me:” “I can’t be your weather, cause if it rains then it rains; I can’t be your lover cause the feelings would change; I can’t be the wind, cause the wind blows too free, but if you want a true companion, don’t forget about me.”

“Anything You Need:” “I’m shattered as the broken glass, around the wreck out on the tracks; you had the very heart of me, in your hands with honesty; you rolled it up within your sleeve like a beacon, and left it out in the cold and the rain; I picked it up and brought it home again.” It is a mixed metaphor, but I think it could easily be used as the motif for the recording as a whole. The refrain is also telling: “You can have anything on earth you need, anything that breathes you surely steal its wings; you can have everything on earth you see; anything on earth you need but me.”

“Goodnight to Mother’s Dream” borders on self-pity. What stops this is that, while there are a couple of lyrics that dip into self-pity’s chilly brook, is the sense that what she reports is a gray truth. I get this impression from the refrain: “And the sailors on the water, they all want the captain’s daughter; they want her beauty and her youth to grace their bow out at the sea; but me I’m getting older and am plain as plain can be.”

“This Heart” closes the recording and rightly so. It is also a song, like the heart, that has more percussion instruments than the previous ones. “This Heart” is also the catchiest tune. While I really do like the song, there are no lyrics I can point to as anything better than average.

“Going Back to Georgia” (duet with Counting Crows’s lead Adam Duritz) is a beautiful song that is subtle about the true emotions but this lyric gives the song away: “He’s chased me down through the towns and the miles, once steeled by love, he was bound to roll on by.” I’ve never heard a more mature way of reconciling the hurt from a love lost like that. To me it says that she taught someone to love and once he learned it, he took his education to use elsewhere.

Love lost is a perpetual theme in Ms. Griffith’s music. What amazes me is that, despite this, the songs very rarely pass into the sappy. I have an extremely low tolerance for sappy love/lost love songs. The feelings we have when these events happen are overwhelming and the artistic turn to pen, guitar, paintbrush to relieve some of the emotional pressure; an extremely small group of artists can create something that is at once personal and broad enough to touch a larger audience and not leave them covered with pine sap:

“Always Will” is a lyric melancholy. Of the sadder songs on Flyer this is my favorite. It is just Ms. Griffith and her guitar with small strings during the refrain and a gentle drum. It has this lyric: “And love has been my passer-by, I’ve stood too still to catch your eye.”

“Fragile” is an odd song. The music is filled with longing, but the lyrics are built on a paradox. It is subtly about a love lost, but that is lost in the strangeness. “I’m fragile as the Lady in the Harbor (Statue of Liberty); I’m fragile as a torch that glows; I’m fragile as Gulf Stream waters to the Texas coast.” You can argue that the torch is fragile, but it takes significant wind to blow one out. The Statue of Liberty isn’t fragile though she might look so from a distance. The Gulf Stream isn’t fragile at all (except with respect to global warming, but that is going too far a field).

“Grafton Street” is a song of longing. It is also a song with simple orchestration which defines the mood better than the words. However, this lyric is fantastic because its delivery belies the importance it carries: “It’s funny how my world goes ‘round without you; you’re the one thing I never thought I could live without; I just found a smile to think about you; you’re a Saturday night far from the madding crowd.”

Love on its last legs is the last major theme: “Say It Isn’t So,” “Talk to Me While I’m Listening,” and “Southbound Train.

“Southbound Train” is problematic because of the lyric “And a stranger sleeps against me, and it feels like I’m his wife.” I take this to mean a growing distance and the rest of the song is just a growing distance to “goodbye.” However it is a difficult song to interpret.

“Talk to Me While I’m Listening” is closer in theme to standard country songs than she usually gets. “Talk to me while I’m listening now, while this love has a voice that we both can hear; before you let it go, the greatest love I’ve ever known, won’t you please talk to me while I’m listening?”

“Say It Isn’t So” is another song whose upbeat music belies the emotions in the song. “Tell me that you’re someone I’ll believe in; am I the last to know, that you don’t love me anymore, oh if you ever did; say it isn’t so.”

Except for “Nobody’s Angel” which doesn’t fit her voice and is annoying because of it, we are left only with the mostly eponymous song. “The Flyer” is a song about a chance encounter at an airport with a type or soul mate that you sometimes meet and depart better for the encounter but wit no real need to continue the connection: “He said he’d never marry cause his heart was in the clouds; and I said was too clumsy, that I broke the wings of the loves I found.”

All in all, the emotional range of Flyer is broader and more mature than earlier (and to my mind later) recordings. I’m still not 100% convinced that it is her best, but it is so accessible and broad that I would recommend it first for someone who had never heard her before and wanted to give it a try.