"I live my life looking for challenges to take on," singer/songwriter Nanci Griffith remarked. She’s found them, beginning with her early performing days in Austin when she’d go from teaching an unruly class of schoolchildren during the day to playing in rowdy bars at night. "I discovered there wasn’t much difference between controlling the kids and controlling the drunks," she recalled. She followed that with several years "driving myself around America playing folk music" and then took her work to Nashville, where she found Grammy nominations, but uncertain commercial acceptance in country and pop markets that didn’t quite know how to categorize Griffith’s honest, detailed songs of commentary and characters from daily life. Griffith sees benefits in this. In a 20-year career, "I’ve been allowed to run totally amok, to record with orchestras, to bring artists together from different areas and countries, to explore my Texas roots rock ’n’ roll background, to go back to folk... I’ve never been the flavor of the month. I’ve always had a very diverse audience in both age group and musical genre."

That audience is now enjoying the results of Griffith’s most recent recording adventure, Other Voices Too: A Trip Back to Bountiful. It comprises songs that Griffith knew and loved growing up and more recent songs that she chose "...because they don’t get heard enough," she explained. They are performed by a cast of 67 musicians, in various combinations of group, duet, and harmony, artists ranging from Dolores Keane and Tish Hinojosa to Darius Rucker and Ian Tyson, with Griffith sometimes taking lead and other times being part of the chorus. It is a follow up to her 1993 release, Other Voices Other Rooms. "I think there are a lot of people out there who maybe have only one Nanci Griffith album and it’s Other Voices Other Rooms. I think that’s because the songs are parts of people’s lives," as they are parts of her history, the singer explained. For this album, "Songs like ‘If I had a Hammer,’ or the Stephen Foster song ‘Hard Times’ — whether it’s the classical fan who doesn’t listen to country or the country fan who thinks folk music is boring, or the punk fan or the rock fan — still these songs are pieces of their lives."

What she learned from the project, Griffith said at first, "was what a nightmare logistics can be!" She continued, "Really, I learned so much... so much from working on the recording sessions, and the book about them brought back this joy in me, this thing about music that I just inhaled from my father as a child. I feel so fortunate to have had a father who introduced me to this music — and this was like a renewal." Recording sessions were scheduled in Dublin, New York, and Nashville, and Griffith remarked proudly, "I think you can really tell. It just feels like you’re in Greenwich Village, or in Ireland, or in Nashville; at least it does to me."