Bringing Her Points Home : Nanci Griffith, Who’ll Play Coach House, Is Ready to Settle Down

Somewhere along the road she has traveled the past 15 years, Nanci Griffith began to realize that “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go”--a phrase she turned into the title of the song she considers her best.

But the winsome singer-songwriter from Texas now believes that life might be less hard if she could spend more of it in one place. That’s why, she says, her current tour (which brings Griffith and her six-member Blue Moon Orchestra to the Coach House tonight) will be her last.

“I like the idea of being settled. I’m ready to stay home. I’ve found out it just means something to stay home,” she said recently by phone from a hotel room in Houston.

Griffith, 37, has a way to go before she can settle into the 100-year-old house in Franklin, Tenn., that she recently finished restoring. Her 11-month tour doesn’t end until August.

“It doesn’t mean I’m going to quit making records or that I won’t do a performance here and there,” she said. “I’ve no intention of retiring. But I’m ready to stay home and write for other people more.”

She said that road-weariness was starting to show three years ago, when she wrote the mainly downcast songs for her 1989 album, “Storms.”

“I was having a lot of personal problems with depression. The worldwide situation and everything was affecting me,” she recalls. “I had been on the road for 10 years, because if I didn’t go out on the road with every album, it didn’t get promoted.”

That low mood helped inspire the forlorn “It’s a Hard Life Wherever You Go,” which reflects on a seemingly endless cycle of hatred, sectarian strife and indifference to suffering.

Griffith says she rebounded from those blues before recording her current album, “Late Night Grande Hotel.”

“In my mind and heart, I was a lighter person,” she said. That allowed for a touch of comedy to shine through on “One Blade Short of a Sharp Edge,” an airy put-down song inspired by a Mercedes-driving yuppie who made a pass at Griffith in Nashville. Still, the album’s prevailing mood is one of wistfulness, as Griffith meditates on loneliness, separation, and the distances both physical and emotional that make it hard to forge secure and lasting relationships.

Those sentiments also might have something to do with Griffith’s decision to limit her travel after this tour. “It’s very difficult to maintain a relationship long distance, especially when you’re gone 10 to 12 weeks at a time,” she said. “My relationship has been with music. Earlier in my life I didn’t feel I was missing anything. But I reached the point where I started missing stability.”

Griffith’s road has been both rewarding and frustrating. She wrote and recorded the original versions of “Love at the Five and Dime” and “Outbound Plane.” Neither song became a hit, though, until it was interpreted by other singers--Kathy Mattea and Suzy Bogguss, respectively. Besides writing good stuff of her own, Griffith has shown a knack for picking ‘em, too. Tapping songs from outside writers, she was the first to record “Goin’ Gone” and “From a Distance.” But again, it was left to others to reap the songs’ potential for mass popularity--Mattea with “Goin’ Gone” and Bette Midler with “From a Distance.”

Griffith says she’s not exactly sure why she has missed the brass ring in America (she has scored hits in England and in Ireland, where her version of “From a Distance” topped the charts). “I’ve had really long conversations with Emmylou Harris about this subject, because she and I are in the same situation. It’s like walking out the door at K mart when the blue-light special goes on for something you’ve just bought. At the time they’re released, they’re just a little ahead of what’s popular at the time. And I don’t fit into trends or formats.”

Griffith began her career on the folk circuit, releasing a series of independent-label albums. When she moved up to a major label, MCA, in 1987, she was marketed at first as a country performer. With her last two albums, including the lushly orchestrated “Grande Hotel,” she has been packaged as pop. With none of the usual category labels entirely suited to what she does, Griffith has come up with her own: “folkabilly.”

“You take a little bit of Carole King, a little bit of Loretta Lynn, a whole lot of Woody Guthrie and stir ‘em up, and what you get is Nanci Griffith,” she said in her light Texas twang. While that hybridization of fertile strains has won her critical accolades, it hasn’t earned her more than a solid cult following.

Griffith said she had no inkling at the start of her career that an element of commercial hard luck would follow wherever she’d go.

“I really wanted to see the world. But if somebody had told me when I was 22 or 23, when I first started driving myself around America, that it would be this hard a road, that the type of music I had chosen to write and play was always going to be the road not taken, and that I’d always end up watching somebody else walk away with the roses, I wouldn’t have done it.”

But, having done it, Griffith says she has found a measure of contentment.

“I do fine at the box office, and I do well in sales. Our sales in America range between 300,000 and 400,000 per album, and they’ve always ended up in the black. I struggled for a long time with being a cult artist in my own country, and I’m happy to be one. Then, to hear my songs coming back at me on the radio (in versions by other singers), it’s like having your cake and eating it too.”

There were no sour grapes on Griffith’s part when Midler’s version of “From a Distance” became a hit after her own had gone unnoticed in the United States. The idealistic hymn to peace became a popular theme during the Persian Gulf War, and its writer, Julie Gold, was awarded the 1991 Grammy for Song of the Year.

“Julie Gold is one of my best friends, so I was thrilled when Bette got the song heard,” Griffith said. “But I was sad that it took the Gulf War to get it heard.”

While Griffith missed out on turning “From a Distance” into a hit, she has reaped a share of its financial success. That’s because when she recorded the song in 1986, Griffith also agreed to be its publisher--a position that brings a cut of the royalties a song generates.

Griffith said that Gold, then an unknown who didn’t have a publishing outlet for her material, asked her to put it under the copyright imprint of Wing and Wheel Music, an entity Griffith established to publish her own songs.

“At the time I didn’t want to do it, because it’s too hard to be responsible for someone else’s work,” Griffith said. “There’s a lot of administrative work involved,” including reviewing requests from singers, filmmakers and advertisers who want permission to use the song.

“Believe it or not, it’s been recorded by 35 different artists,” including the Byrds and Judy Collins. “Before Bette cut it, Julie had specifically asked that it never be used for television commercials. We’ve had (requests from) beer companies, soda companies, camera companies--you can imagine. I think if it had been (placed) with a regular commercial publisher, it would have gotten used for purposes Julie didn’t want. I get to be the bad guy and say, ‘No, you can’t do that.’ ”

Griffith’s own music has been in demand from some outside sources: she said that she wrote a song, “Cradle on the Interstate,” for the soundtrack of “Falling From Grace,” the upcoming movie that marks the film directing debut of rocker John Cougar Mellencamp. Griffith also appeared recently as a guest of the traditional Irish band, the Chieftains, recording three songs in concert with them in Belfast. She said the performance will be included on an upcoming live album and in a television special set for broadcast on St. Patrick’s Day.

Accompanying Griffith on her current tour are representatives from the National Coalition for the Homeless. They’ll be selling special T-shirts, with proceeds going to local agencies that help the homeless in each community that Griffith plays.

Since 1988, Griffith also has made a practice of personally donating the leftovers from her dressing room catering trays to rescue missions and shelters.

“I realized that money isn’t the only donation that you can make,” she said. “These people need friendship and encouragement.”

She said she has never been asked to sing during one of those charitable visits. “I don’t think it’s something they’re concerned with at midnight when we stop in with food” after a concert. “I’m not there to promote Nanci Griffith.”

“We usually have a case or two of cold drinks and lots of cheese,” Griffith said, ticking off the edibles normally left over for donation (the dressing-room menus are spelled out in her performance contracts).

“Usually there’s pasta salad and a basket of fruit. We don’t have meat. There’s something about walking into a dressing room and seeing cold, flat meat on a tray that isn’t very appetizing.”

* Nanci Griffith and Tom Kimmel play tonight at 8 at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tickets: $25. Information: (714) 496-8930.