Flying Upside Down
Artist: Griffin House
Label: ITunes or E-Music

Griffin House is one of those rare young men with a natural propensity to simply write irresistible tunes in the rock idiom that could programme a radio station for the entire day. All his songs seem so effortlessly put together that they just dropped out of the sky onto his guitar and into his mouth. Add the confident voice and he’s a record company dream. "Heartbreakers," "Mike Campbell," and "Benmont Tench" show the intent in ambition and direction. You’d hate to be working for his record company trying to choose singles! 

The poppy led off track "Better Than Love" is radio’s new flirtatious lover but is not the deepest or most authentic love song here ("Heart of Stone" and "The Guy That Says Goodbye To You" are a much more stellar additions to the catalogue of the love song) and when it gives way to "I Remember You" (It’s Happening Again) we move into another dimension altogether. In less than five minutes of the latter, Griffin becomes a prophet and pastor with a little bit of preacher too; prophetic in challenging the foreign policy that is at war again in a history recycle that links his grandfather’s story of fighting in foreign lands with his best friend at war right now. Where the songs starts with an anti war slant it ends with sympathy all the same for those caught up in the mess. The preacher is when he reads through all the Gospels to find out if he can know who Jesus would go to war for. That spirituality comes out in another stand out track, "Waiting For the Rain to Come" that Johnny Cash is fretting about in heaven because it was written for him… too late; a spiritual with hope and truth and earthed faith. "Hanging On" (Tom’s Song) is the other that particularly stands out in its impact. A song about someone whose father walks out on the family when the boy is six years old and the boy grows up with the most powerful way of dealing with his dad – “If I can’t lift him up/I will not leave him hanging on to me.” It is one of those songs that should be available on the national health. It is those songs with more purposeful function that lifts music above art for art or the profit’s sake and into a whole other stratosphere of importance. 

Griffin House-hold name is a very real possibility. He has a quantitative back catalogue that is also qualitative. 

Steve Stockman

Steve Stockman is the Presbyterian Chaplain at Queens University, Belfast, Ireland, where he lives in community with 88 students. He has written two books Walk On; The Spiritual Journey of U2 which he is currently updating and The Rock Cries Out; Discovering Eternal Truth in Unlikely Music. He dabbles in poetry and songwriting and he has a weekly radio show on BBC Radio Ulster (listen anytime of day or night @ www.bbc.co.uk/ni/religion/rhythmandsoul). He has his own web page--Rhythms of Redemption at http://stocki.ni.org . He also tries to spend some time with his wife Janice and daughters Caitlin and Jasmine.