Patty Griffin

CROWN OF ROSES

“The older you get, you just get sick of yourself staying stuck where you’ve been stuck.”

Patty Griffin is talking about “Back at the Start,” the pulsating first track on her new album Crown of Roses. But in examining the idea of letting go of the stories we tell ourselves, she could be talking about the entire album and, indeed, her life.

From a focus on the trajectory of women in the 20th and 21st centuries to communion with nature, a meaningful reconnection with her late mother, and ruminating on the changing inner and outer world during the pandemic, Griffin had no shortage of topics to contemplate over the last few years. What she didn’t always have was certainty of purpose.

“A lot of people had creative explosions during the pandemic, I had the opposite,” says Griffin of writing and refining songs in the quiet of 2020 and 2021, keeping some, junking others. “Sometimes I feel like the Earth is oversaturated with words, and I just didn't feel confident about adding anything to the conversation.”

Fortunately, the two-time Grammy winner and Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement award winner, considered one of the best songwriters of her generation, or any other, changed her mind.

Occasionally, she would fish an idea out of the trash, realizing there was something there after all. “Back at the Start” was one of those reclamation projects. “I came back to it because I like that first line: ‘There's secrets I don't tell ever to myself/I just keep moving.’”

The song continues: “It’s like working on a building with my eyes closed/Nothing’s improving/Day after day I stood in my own way/In front of my own door.”

“I think that that describes so many people,” she says. “Part of it is about getting on with it, but part is also about staying stuck and going through the motions. It's really a constant thing to try to be alive while you're alive.”

Over the course of eight moody tracks that evoke the scrubby west of her adopted Texas and the calming verdancy of her home state of Maine, the Austin-based singer-songwriter captures an essential truth about the business of living: Becoming unstuck is not the same thing as coming unglued.

Produced by longtime collaborator Craig Ross, Crown of Roses drifts from spare folk to gauzy Americana to sly gospel blues in songs that explore how to dig in while simultaneously surrendering, in a way only a songwriter of Griffin’s agility could balance. “If I try to hit things on the nose, they don’t feel authentic to me. If I can emotionally dance around things, it feels like I can be more honest singing it.”

Burrowing into the stories she had been telling herself about her most complex relationships — with her mother, with the sound of her own voice after cancer treatment made its mark, with her androcentrism — Crown of Roses continues Griffin’s streak of translating thorny concepts and finely wrought character studies into songs that speak as much to her own experience as they do to the lives of those who have loved her music now for 30 years.

After road testing the songs as a kind of pre-production process with her trusted band members – David Pulkingham and Michael Longoria – she realized it was time to get them down with Ross in the studio.

“Craig’s been a friend for 30 years, so he's like family,” she says of the producer/multi-instrumentalist. “There is a way that we've learned to be around each other that’s a pretty solid foundation of mutual respect. I always feel like he's got a sense of adventure.”

That implicit trust was key since Griffin needed to release the reins.  “It was right around the time when my mom started really heading south,” she says. “So, I asked him to just take over the whole thing.”

Griffin’s mother loomed large in her life; although she did not sing publicly, she did sing around the house, instilling in her daughter a love of music. Her wedding day photo graces the cover set into artwork by Mishka Westell that captures many of her loves, including the Maine woods of her and Patty’s own childhood.

“My mom knew all the bird sounds and knew all the animals, and knew all the plants,” says Griffin of the forest near their home where her mother worked with Griffin’s grandfather as a child. “She taught us to just be a part of that natural world. It was a place where, when I was a kid, I would just go out and lie on some pine needles and fall asleep.” 

The youngest of seven, Griffin and her mother were not always close, but in the last decade and a half, she worked on bridging the distance between them. “In the last six-seven years, I amped up the contact,” Griffin says of the mother she came to see in a new light of compassion and admiration. “During the pandemic, I talked to her every day. We got closer than I ever dreamed we would get.”

While deepening that connection, Griffin grew to appreciate her mother’s intelligence and resilience as well as her own perception of their sometimes-fraught dynamic. “I learned how to take the punches a little bit better, and that’s been good for me in general to just not be so sensitive about shit. No one’s ever going to be perfect for you.”

These discoveries are reflected in several songs, including the atmospheric “Born in a Cage,” which blends warm fiddle and the warbling of the santur for a western-tinged ballad that contemplates a vanishing world with a beguiling sigh.

The song captures what Griffin’s mother was experiencing as time wound down and the natural beauty outside her window changed.

“At the end, my mom was noticing that the songbirds weren't showing back up in the spring, and rabbits and all kinds of animals were disappearing. Even the coyotes moved into Maine because they lost their habitat. There were all these changes to the delicate balance, and it must've been really hard to see.”

“Way Up to the Sky” is a picture of emotional authenticity in its simplest form, just voice and guitar, as a woman considers her legacy and just how she arrived at her current destination, joined to a man with an impenetrable mind and all her natural resources draining away. “I’d try different voices and styles, but it finally just ended up being a little tiny folk song that I’m whispering on,” she says of the poignant track.

That hushed intimacy suffuses the album overall and represents Griffin’s approach to her voice, which changed post-radiation. Everyone who listens to Crown of Roses will recognize the signature blend of silk, grit, and steel in the way Griffin moves from tremulous to flinty on the Spanish-tinged character study “All the Way Home.” The foundation remains solid, but through necessity and craftsmanship, the album finds her in a more tender mode, as likely to murmur as she is to belt. Griffin found that voice partially by surrendering her guitar to long-time guitarist/collaborator David Pulkingham. She leans in to whispers on the spectral “Long Time,” which includes a backing vocal cameo from Robert Plant – “He can add the scariness to anything,” she says with an affectionate laugh.

“When I was really struggling, I handed a lot of things to David that I would’ve done so I could focus on singing and work on my body being in the right position and getting stronger,” says Griffin. “I ended up discovering ways of singing that I enjoyed that I hadn’t really gotten to try before because I’ve always been playing the guitar really hard, and I realized how much I love that stuff.”

She cites Brazilian singer Rosa Passos, the late Billie Holiday, Rickie Lee Jones, and her mother as beacons for her vocal approach. “They have that really delicate to-the-bone vocal that they know how to do,” Griffin says.

As someone who enjoyed, and perhaps relied on, her former vocal athleticism, she came to appreciate a more delicate stance, realizing it suited the songs and decided “to write a whole record of as much of that as I can get in there. And David helped to bring that out of me.”

Once she was able to look at Crown of Roses as a body of work, Griffin had another epiphany that dovetailed nicely with the concept of getting unstuck. She noticed that much of her previous work had been focused on men and trying to understand them.

“I grew up with enough of that patriarchal injection into my veins to think that if I could just find the right key to turn and the right words to say and the right way to be, I could get those men to listen, and that was dumb, but I think menopause has a way of relieving you from those duties.” 

Crown of Roses, she realized, was the first record where she was mainly concerned about women. “It’s where my interests are,” says Griffin simply. Those interests represented fresh earth to dig, with Crown of Roses as the result. It contains some of Griffin’s most profound work. 

In reappraising her mother’s journey — and by extension her own and those of the women of the world and how they have been treated historically — Griffin is grateful for her shift in perspective and says there are two things which she is now sure of: “There’s a lot of work to do, and I’m glad to be a woman.”

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