Impossible Dream is an album to listen to during a long night drive. The passing lights fuse with the music. The distant echos of something like angel choirs resonate in the shadows. And Griffin’s voice tells sad stories about the darkest darkness, her hand cupped around a single match that looks on the verge of going out, singing her heart out for hope and dreams. Sadness has rarely sounded so beautiful, hope never so feeble and yet fierce, and brokenness so broken. Impossible Dream will make you long for home even as it brings alive these strange lands fraught with wreckage. It’s an album to stand with the best of Emmylou Harris’s work—and that includes Wrecking Ball. It makes complete sense that Harris, along with Lisa Germano, Buddy Miller, and Julie Miller are able to participate on the album without ever threatening to upstage this star in her shining hour. Craig Ross's production is as pristine as T-Bone Burnett's, as spacious as Daniel Lanois' signature style, and yet never becomes mimicry. Impossible Dream should make this year’s Country Music Awards unnecessary because nothing is going to come close.

The album opens with a stomping, shuffling gospel number calling for love to “throw a line.” At first listen, it sounds like a big party’s going on. But then the lyrics get their hooks in:

There's a war and a plague
Smoke and disaster
Lions in the coliseum
Screams of laughter
Motherless children
A witness and a bible
Nothing but rain ahead
No chance for our survival

Just when most gospel numbers would really put the pedal to the metal and take off, she turns it down low until it fades away, so we get the feeling that the song’s still going on somewhere, behind the rest of the album, praying for love’s help.

In “Cold as it Gets,” she relates a hushed, half-whispered, shadowy tale that’s a cross between Bob Dylan’s “Man in the Long Black Coat” (it concludes with identical notes that hang in the air like a chill) and Julie Miller’s “All My Tears.” “I am the one who crawled through the wire,” she tells us, and testifies to having witnessed “a million sad stories on the side of the road,” horrors that “blew out the light of my soul.” She searches for a hint of solace sought below an open window where a curtain tellingly waves…

Searching for levity in memory, she comes across a snapshot of fleeting happiness. “Kite Song” makes a metaphor for prayers, as she sings:

In the middle of the night
The world turns with all of it's might
A little diamond colored blue
In the middle of the night
We keep sending little kites
Until a little light gets through

This impresses upon us the fragility of all we hold, but she assures us that, in those moments when “all the trouble went away… it wasn’t just a dream.” We can hear a choir like a wind over the undulating piano waves on which Griffin’s melody carefully wavers and floats

This is followed by a gospel number that’s missing everything but the gospel. It is, essentially, a declaration of resolve, to stand firm in spite of the tangible fear that is terrorizing the world around her. “Standing” resonates with tones from a Hammond organ and something like a dream of a gospel choir, or strains of an angel chorus, reaching out through space and time. Someday somebody’s going to sing this in a church backed by a gospel choir and the roof’s going to blow off the building. But for now, this version simmers just fine, and it’s a good thing she doesn’t take it over the top considering the parade of emotional peaks yet to come on the album.

The song that’ll probably become a hit, “Useless Desires,” deserves every spin it gets. This is the kind of song that wins an album Grammies, that eventually gets covered by Emmylou Harris,  and gets played constantly on the radio without ever getting old. It acknowledges the inevitability of change, and the inevitably of accompanying pain.

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye old friend
I can’t make you stay
But I can wait here another ten years
Wishing you would anyway.

As if Griffin's voice is not soulful enough, Lisa Germano's violin speaks with such eloquence that I'm reminded of the scripture about the Spirit interceding for us in "groanings too deep for words."

Speaking of Useless Desires… the next song, “Top of the World,” begins with a list of regrets and wishes, sung by a broken-hearted husband, grieved by his own failures to show and receive love. Paining him most is the way he has failed his beloved, the way he has held her back from being what she could have been. The realization is just sinking in, the damage that he has caused, the potential he has stifled, the dreams he has made impossible. What has he been missing? A god to teach him lessons, a love for Jesus like that which his wife has. This is my favorite track. It’s the one that finally made me pull the car over, overcome.

It’s followed by a soft echo from the past, a recording of Griffin's parents singing “To dream the impossible dream…” It's easy to believe that Griffin wakes each morning haunted by this refrain, and that it sustains her through trials with its Quixotic zeal....

Another potential hit, “When It Don’t Come Easy,” is a vow of devotion to others in trouble. This one’s especially effective when you’re recovering from “Top of the World,” sitting out there in the dark, in the car, trying to must the courage to get back on the road.

If you break down, I’ll drive out and find you
If you forget my love, I’ll try to remind you

In “Florida,” the singer recognizes and owns some of the responsibility for her own brokenness. But there’s little chance that she’ll muster the courage to change things; she’s singing to the husband that neglects her, and seems to have surrendered to her lonely fate:

Isn’t it hard sometimes
Isn’t it lonely
The way I still hang around you
With nothing to hold me…

At last, she turns to the only source of hope that has blessed her over the years. “Mother of God” takes us back to nightmarish childhood memories and then fast-forwards to the present conditions of sorrow, hardship, and endless servitude. It could be about the same character as the last song, a comment on how common it is for these love stories to fray and sour when one person’s love is not true, faithful, and resilient.

Something as simple as boys and girls
Gets tossed all around and lost in the world
Something as hard as a prayer on your back
You wait a long time for an answer…

The singer notes that she’s “too many miles from the ocean,” and by now we’re starved for some solace as well. “Mother of God” is the saddest kind of prayer, the deepest kind of blue, and you want something like Over the Rhine’s “Changes Come” or Bob Dylan’s “Ring Them Bells” to follow it up, to tear down the curtain between us and God’s healing influence.

What we get is just enough to turn our eyes skyward. “Icicles” offers a reminder that no trial is permanent, no season goes unchanged: “I hear that ice is falling.”

And so we lean forward, toward the thaw, and hope of spring.

It’s been a year of albums born of heartbreak. Uh Huh Her unleashed the post-breakup wrath of PJ Harvey. A Boot and a Shoe gave us something entirely different--Sam Phillips’ humble and personal confessions, frank testimonies of betrayal and grief, and her soulful, poetic, and prayerful hope.

Griffin’s album shows she has transformed her own sufferings, longings, and the stories she’s observed into a gallery of stories that are at once fictional and deeply personal. Her voice makes the sincerity of her longing unmistakable. We’re ready to walk with her through the dark in hope that “maybe there’s a wedding at the end of every war.”