PATTY GRIFFIN
Singer-songwriter’s insightful music resonates deeply
Patty Griffin made nine albums in the past 20 years. Yet each recording the singer-songwriter releases feels like a rare gift on arrival, in part because her songs feel meticulously crafted and mysterious.
But don’t go to Griffin for answers as to what her songs are about.
“I like not knowing for sure about them — what they might mean — myself,” Griffin says.
Overlap between her intentions and a listener’s interpretations varies depending on the song and the listener, which may explain why her work resonates so deeply with those who know it. Like the very best songwriters, she pens lyrics with open doors and windows so that the personal becomes communal.
Griffin has called her latest album “Servant of Love,” a title that on the surface suggests a rudimentary romanticism. But over the course of 12 songs, “Servant” reveals a more multifaceted theme: Some love is good, some is bad, each has its own servants. Griffin contemplates of the gray space between where something ends — love, life, childhood — and something new starts.
She states the theme most clearly in the song “Made of the Sun”: “Something’s lost, something new begins.”
The theme sounds hopeful, though getting there can be a choppy ride befitting an album that opens and closes with references to the ocean.
“I long to live, live by the ocean,” are the album’s first lines. Some one or some thing calls from the blue beyond, but the sound is ominous. The album closes on a note of rebirth in “Shine a Different Way,” and its peaceful closing image of “the moonlight and the glistening waves.”
Despite making her living writing and singing songs, Griffin doesn’t seem comfortable talking about her work. Still she acknowledges an interest in the connectedness of things — life and love, moon and sea — that may have informed the new album.
“I do think there’s strong evidence of life continuing in different forms on the planet,” she says. “I feel like there are big mysteries beyond the things that we grapple with each day just to get by. Existence is hard to explain. We accept it as a given … but pondering it beyond what we do with coffee in the morning — it can be hard for us to think simply about difficult things.” She laughs. “They get complicated in our brains.”
Griffin, 51, has for years lived in Austin. But some residue of Old Town, Maine, where she grew up, informs her work.
“I don’t think of Maine in a romantic way, exactly,” she says. “But it does mean something particular to me. It’s a different place. You have that border with Canada. There’s so much Native American history in Maine. And then there’s that old Yankee thing in the coastal areas. The weather, the environment, they’re different. It’s an isolated and magical place.”
Framed this way, Maine sounds like a Patty Griffin song.
She got her first guitar as a teen, but not with the intention of becoming a professional musician. She played little coffeehouses in Boston, and didn’t release an album until “Living With Ghosts” when she was 32.
“Ghosts” is her most basic album, and it still sounds timeless 20 years later. Her voice — strong but with a touch of fragility — has long served her words beautifully, but other musicians quickly tuned into her work. That first album included “Let Him Fly,” which was covered by the Dixie Chicks, who have gone to Griffin’s songbook multiple times. The long list of artists who have recorded Griffin’s work includes Kelly Clarkson, Miranda Lambert, Emmylou Harris, Solomon Burke, Martina McBride and Bette Midler.
Every two years or so, Griffin would release an album of her own to rave reviews and a gently swelling audience of devoted listeners.
“American Kid” (2013) and “Servant of Love” find Griffin making the best music of her distinguished career. “American Kid” dealt with the death of her father. A public breakup — at least public by Griffin’s private standards — may have found its way into some of the songs on “Servant,” though not in any manner that is clearly decipherable .
More often the album touches on thoughts about the passage of time. Griffin opens up some talking about her mother, who inspired “Made in the Sun.” Another song, “250,000 Miles” draws from another mother/ daughter relationship.
Griffin clearly states that her mother is “my go-to for a lot of things. So many of the best moments in my life have been with her, one on one.”
But she also enjoys the perspective she has on their relationship now that she’s in her 50s.
“That’s a good thing about getting older,” she says. “You have the opportunity to see your parents as the people they are and not just your parents. As we get older we thirst for information about the people who raised us. We go back to big experiences we had as children. My mom, in many of those instances, was an amazing person to think about.”
Some of the songs look further outward to what Griffin refers to as “the troubles humans created for themselves.” A gun and a dead child inform “Gunpowder,” and an “oil slick and the smell of fear” in “Everything’s Changed.”
Griffin comes to town next week for a show with nonpartisan purpose. She’s joined by Sara Watkins and Anaïs Mitchell on the Use Your Voice Tour, which finds them working with the League of Women Voters with the hope of increasing voter registration.
“Women are under-representing themselves,” Griffin says. “Maybe they don’t feel like they can, or they don’t feel like they should vote. So our goal is to get people out to vote.”
Such a spare sonic environment provides a perfect format for Griffin’s songs, allowing her voice and words to be heard without any further dressing. The stories that arise have a weariness and a hopefulness. She recognizes the ups mean nothing without the downs.
“Be thankful for the sun,” she sings on “There Isn’t One Way.” “Be thankful for the blues. For the gold in your ears. For the holes in your shoes.”