In 2020, during the prime of her career, Patty Griffin won her second Grammy. Quietly, she was contemplating retirement.
The best folk album winner started recording in the mid-1990s. She’d steadily risen to playing to theater-size audiences. Her songs have often been covered by others; fans include Emmylou Harris, Miranda Lambert, Kelly Clarkson, and occasional collaborator Robert Plant. Not bad for someone who got her start by buying herself a $50 guitar at age 16. But five years ago, she found herself at an existential crossroads.
“I really was kind of thinking about hanging up my guitar,” she says in a Zoom interview.
Why We Wrote This
Grammy-winning musician Patty Griffin almost called it quits. But the pandemic brought a reconciliation with her mother – and a perspective on joy and unconditional love that found an outlet in her music.
The songwriter had recently come through a serious illness and treatment that had ravaged her ability to sing. Unable to pump the bellows of her gusty alto, Ms. Griffin says the pandemic was almost a relief because it offered permission to check out. Ms. Griffin turned her focus to repairing a lifelong strained relationship with her ailing mother. What she didn’t anticipate was that that process would help her rediscover her voice. It had a healing effect. The reconciliation inspired a new album, “Crown of Roses,” debuting July 25. Its eight tracks showcase why Ms. Griffin is so revered.
“As a songwriter, Patty’s strength is in her truth telling,” says country music troubadour Darrell Scott – whose new album “Wayne’s Pain” is a tribute to his father – in an email sent by his publicist. “The listener knows they are hearing emotional truth from the heart: real, experienced, believed. Fragile and strong at the same time.”
Ms. Griffin had spent her previous 10 albums often writing about men. By contrast, “Crown of Roses” tells stories about women – including her mother, Lorraine Griffin, whose wedding day photo adorns its cover.
“She and I were not the best of friends,” says the songwriter, whose father died more than a decade ago. “We couldn’t really get past a certain point of conversation without getting really [mad] at each other.”
Lorraine Griffin was born in Maine during the Great Depression. Her Irish immigrant family was destitute. When the young girl wasn’t at school, she was working. Her life changed during third grade. Catholic school nuns took her class to a public library where she obtained a library card. Books introduced her to new vistas. As Patty Griffin put it in “Sweet Lorraine,” a song on her 1996 album “Living with Ghosts,” her mother “spoke of paintings in Paris, and outlandish things” to her family just to scare them. She got a college education. A first in her family. Then, while studying for her master’s degree, she married a fellow teacher. Over the next seven years, she gave birth to an equal number of children. She abandoned her professional career to be a full-time mom raising seven children. Full time, indeed.
“She just sort of always followed the pattern that she was told to follow by being a woman,” says Ms. Griffin, the youngest sibling. “She didn’t really have confidence that she lived her life well. And then was worried that that anger had spilled onto her kids, which it had.”
Ms. Griffin has released a couple of songs about her mother over the years, which made the matriarch resentful. She didn’t voice her love for her children aloud and never told her youngest that she was proud of her. The brittle relationship echoed the one that she had with her own mother, Patty’s grandmother. Ms. Griffin made a conscious decision to break the cycle.
“As your parents don’t really actually try to murder you … then you should probably not write them off,” she laughs.
During the pandemic, Ms. Griffin spent two hours on the phone with her mother each day. The songwriter confided that she was struggling to write songs. When she did complete them, she often threw them away. Her confidence had taken a nose dive due to her vocal struggles. Her mother began to drop little grace notes of encouragement into their conversations. It wasn’t something that came naturally to her. So it meant all the more to her daughter. It had been Lorraine Griffin’s own love of singing that had first inspired Patty Griffin’s love of music.
“You really begin to love that person for the traits that they have,” says Ms. Griffin. “You’re not … wishing they had these traits to be this kind of mother that I’ve been told I should have.”
The songwriter also started to face the fact that, by her own account, she’d gone into hiding rather than face her creative blocks. Ms. Griffin remembered that she wasn’t “hopelessly untalented.”
“I would spend a little time singing and I would feel this happiness from it,” she says.
Ms. Griffin’s new album is a reclamation of sorts. She reckons it’s one of her best. “Crown of Roses” opens, appropriately enough, with the strident lead single “Back at the Start.” The singer’s voice doesn’t sound diminished. On the gospel-influenced “I Know a Way,” the updrafts in her voice build like the formation of a cumulonimbus until it bursts into a quiet storm.
“As a singer, she is hugely diverse,” says Mr. Scott, who sang with Ms. Griffin when they were members of Robert Plant’s Band of Joy in 2010. “Folk, soul, rockin’, country, gospel. It’s all in her reach and she sings from wherever the song and character needs to speak.”
Several lyrics on the album chronicle the travails of women. “Way up to the Sky” empathizes with her mother’s struggles with her lot in life. Ms. Griffin says she and her mother learned a lot about unconditional love during their last years together. Lorraine Griffin died in February.
The album closer, “A Word,” includes the poignant line, “The love you leave on earth goes round forever.” The song isn’t about Ms. Griffin’s mother. But the songwriter says that when people die, their fundamental nature still seems tangible.
“The love I have for her is more powerful now,” says Ms. Griffin. “I miss her presence, but it’s not grief. It’s a joy about my love for her.”
