Chapter 3
“Night Ride Turns Twenty-Five”
Thanks to the Netflix hit Evermore, the Griffin Sisters, the early aughts pop-rock colossus, is enjoying a second life.
With a new generation of fans finding their songs, can the band’s true believers hope for new music?
Margaret Frantz
Rolling Stone
Poetic.
Emotional.
Intimate.
Confessional.
Read enough articles, reviews, and blog posts about the Griffin Sisters, and there are words and phrases that come up again and again.
But when you ask someone who was there—someone who was just the right age, at just the right time and place and moment in her life to hear their music or see them live—you might not get any words at all.
Instead, you’ll get the same expressions, identical gestures.
You’ll watch a woman’s gaze go unfocused as she searches for ways to explain what the band’s music meant to her when she was fifteen and felt freakish, or sixteen and the boy she’d had a crush on told her he just wanted to be friends—then started dating her thinner, prettier best friend.
Hands will move through the air, trying to conjure the words to communicate how the band’s lyrics made them feel connected, not invisible and not alone.
Eyes will fill with tears; heads will shake; shoulders will lift in shrugs.
“There is no way for me to explain it,”
said Amanda Shaw.
Now in her forties, married with children, Shaw saw the band perform live, twice, in Pittsburgh, when she was eighteen.
“It’s all of the clichés.
It felt like someone read my diary, or read my mind; like someone took everything I was thinking and feeling and turned it into songs, and made my life make sense.
Or, at least, let me know that I’d survive it.”
Other bands have fans.
The Sisters have acolytes—mostly female ones, many, but not all, of whom are white—women who were tweens and teenagers and young women when the band was ascendant.
They are now grown-ups, who’ve tattooed the bands’ lyrics on their bodies and worked them into their wedding vows, who’ve named pets and children after Cassie and Zoe Griffin, who, along with guitar player and songwriter Russell D’Angelo, drummer Tommy Kelleher, and bass player Cameron Gratz, made up the band.
They’ve designed tee shirts featuring Zoe Griffin, in silhouette, making her signature concert-closing gesture of kissing two fingers and raising them to the sky.
They’ve made pilgrimages to the Philadelphia and Philly-adjacent places name-checked in the songs like “Last Night in Fishtown”—Broad Street, the Schuylkill River, the Camden aquarium, and the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.
They keep tribute bands and karaoke parlors in business and spend their free time on Discord groups, Slack channels, and Subreddits devoted to the Griffin Sisters’ music.
Some of them write fan fiction about the band’s members and give Zoe and Russell the happily ever after that real life did not.
Some of them write songs themselves.
It’s a disproportionately outsized legacy, considering that the Griffin Sisters recorded just a single album, the triple-platinum Night Ride, which was released in September of 2003.
The album came out in a world that had breathed a sigh of relief when the horrors of Y2K failed to materialize, only to live through the tragedy of 9/11.
Heroin-chic models shared magazine covers with plaid-and-babydoll-dress-wearing grunge goddesses; reality TV shows, with their star-making power, were on the rise; and the Britney/Justin breakup made headlines all over the world.
For a moment, radio had room for a panoply of women artists, confessional singer-songwriters, R&B girl groups, and singing, dancing pop princesses.
The Griffin Sisters gave listeners the best of both worlds—the raw, intimate lyrics and expert musicianship that Cassie Griffin provided, along with the sex appeal and showmanship that were Zoe Griffin’s hallmarks.
“It’s hard to explain just how big they were,”
said Allison McCrae, a professor of women’s studies and pop culture at Rutgers University.
“By 2004, there were thirteen million copies of Night Ride sold.
One out of every ten households in America owned a copy of the album.
It was unprecedented.
There’s been nothing like that, before or since.”
McCrae’s book In One Voice: Women Singer-Songwriters from Joni Mitchell to Taylor Swift calls the Griffin Sisters one of—if not the—definitive groups of the early aughts.
More than twenty years after their breakup, the story of how the girls were discovered, just out of high school in Philadelphia, how the band was formed, how Russell D’Angelo fell in love with Zoe Griffin, and all the tragedies that ensued—from D’Angelo’s death to the band’s dissolution to Cassie Griffin’s disappearance—has become a legend, a story the acolytes know by heart.
“I knew right away that they were something special,”
David Katz, an executive for Relic Records, recalled.
His nephew saw the sisters perform at a Battle of the Bands in Philadelphia, and Katz, in town for the holidays, went to their Fishtown rowhouse and heard them the very next day.
Katz immediately brought the girls to New York City, where they ended up playing for three different labels, before signing with Relic.
“I had never heard a voice like Cassie’s, not before, and not since.”
By March of 2004, the band’s first single, “The Gift,”
climbed the charts to number six.
Then “Stay the Night”
was released, and after that the hits just kept on coming.
Over the next nine months, four more of the album’s thirteen songs hit the charts.
Two of them—the girl-power banger “Bloom”
and the ballad “The Only Lonely Girl”—made it to number one.
“Even though Cassie Griffin was the lead singer, Russell D’Angelo was an essential part of what made the Griffin Sisters what it was,”
said McCrae.
D’Angelo was co-credited, along with Cassie Griffin, as songwriter for twelve of the album’s thirteen songs.
“Russell was a world-class songwriter, and he did his best work with the Griffin Sisters,”
said Kevin Douglas, a former colleague of D’Angelo’s and a Grammy-winning songwriter whose hits have been sung by Kelly Clarkson and Meghan Trainor.
“When he was writing for a boy band, he could sound like a sixteen-year-old boy with a crush.
When he was writing with Cassie, he sounded like a young woman, whether she was lonely, or angry, or head over heels in love.”
What would have happened if Russell D’Angelo had lived into his thirties, and middle age? Or if the band had had a more standard trajectory, a more normal breakup? “Maybe Cassie could have found another writing partner or written more songs on her own,”
McCrae said.
“Maybe she and Zoe could have performed together, as a duo, or formed another band.”
There are dozens of what-ifs, hundreds of possibilities.
What’s certain is that the public’s love for the Griffin Sisters’ music, the poetry of its lyrics wrapped around driving pop-rock hooks, has never diminished.
With the album’s twenty-fifth anniversary approaching, and the band’s music finding new fans via Netflix, that appetite has only sharpened.
The only question is whether the band’s remaining members have any plans to sate it.