Patty Griffin

0:06Pushkin.

0:10When Patti Griffin released Crown of Roses earlier this year, she delivered something both timeless and urgent. It's an album that draws on gospel, folk, and soul to explore themes of faith, doubt, and resilience. It's a return to the stripped-down intimacy of her earliest work, but with the wisdom and craft of an artist who spent nearly three decades refining her voice. That voice first emerged in 1996 with Living With Ghosts. Recorded on a simple four-track in her Boston apartment, the album introduced a songwriter who could turn personal pain into something universal. Over the years that followed, Griffin's songs have been covered by everyone from The Chicks to Solomon Burke, while her own recordings have earned her multiple Grammy nominations and a reputation as a songwriter's songwriter.

0:57On today's episode, Bruce Sedlum talks to Patti Griffin about the inspiration behind Crown of Roses and how grit has shaped her songwriting throughout her career. They also discuss her early days in Boston's folk scene and the stories behind some of her most well-known songs. She also reflects on how finally getting to know her mother at the end of her life inspired her to see her mother's story in a whole new light. This is Broken Record. Real musicians, real conversations.

1:30This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human. Do you ever wish your office felt better? Buzzy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make workspaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, Buzzy Space has you covered. Head to buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I dot space. Here's Bruce Hedlum with Patti Griffin. So, Patti Griffin, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. I was looking this up. Your first album came out 29 years ago.

2:14Is that right? 29 years ago. And I can't think of a better songwriter over that period of time than you. Oh, wow. Maybe somebody else could. Thank you. Okay. Well, I can't. So we'll go over your list later. But my list starts with you. And you've got a new album called Crown of Roses. Yep. Can you talk a little bit about what you were thinking going into this album? What led up to you doing this album? This album, there's a lot going on in my life for the last 10 years. It's just sort of tumultuous years. And tumultuous in the way that everything just kind of turned upside down, but it doesn't look very exciting from the outside.

2:58You know, there's just all kinds of stuff you've got to work with that's new and different and harder. And my mom is passing away in this period of time. And so she's in there. I think I'm probably hitting a lot of my old themes with this record, but it's just my older person's take on it, you know? How's your take changed? I don't need hope to be hopeful. Does that make any sense at all? I feel like just the opposite of that settles me and makes me feel like knowing that you're going to struggle, things are going to be hard, and that that's just part of being human and you're not going to escape that.

3:38And, you know, sort of just getting that in my bones has been a really great part of my life because I think it's you get to be a little more free. You stop striving for certain things that are, you know, you sort of automatically strive for if you're born in the West. It's a little apocalyptic, this album. Is it? Yeah. Really? You've got, well, in the sense that the apocalypse is also kind of a new beginning, and the first song is back at the start. You have birds disappearing. You have songs called The End. It's really a, I'll be mixing my metaphors to say it's a baptism by fire, but there is a sense of a lot of things ending and things starting in this record.

4:29And I think that sort of the world is in a phase like that. So it makes a lot of sense that I would be personally in a phase like that, just being a person that somebody lives on the world. You know what I mean? I think that we're all experiencing that kind of change right now. The animals in the bottom of the sea, the plants are under siege. And it makes sense that I would also be experiencing things that way. You sent a note to Ken Weinstein, whom you work with, something to the effect that so much of your work has been focused on men and trying to understand them. Right. And this is the first time on record you've spent a lot of time telling women's stories.

5:15Yeah. What do you think prompted that? I got a lot more interested in women's stories through hanging out with my mom. I think that just sort of naturally happened. And getting to know my mother was like discovering this amazing creature that had been there all along that didn't know how to come out. Because women, especially from her generation, they just kind of got passed over for their own understanding of their contributions and their power was really just undervalued, I would say. And getting to know my mom, I realized she's a badass. She was a badass. And she was so smart and funny and tough as shit, you know, and stronger than anybody I'd ever really met.

6:11She grew up in poverty. She put herself through college. She got married in the 50s and went straight into having seven babies in seven years. Wow. Stayed pregnant for seven years and then was just overwhelmed with that for a long time. And I think, you know, the fine-tuning motherhood thing never happened with me because I was number seven. You know what I mean? So it just was easy for me to sort of drift off and do my thing and not really worry about my mother at the end because I feel like the bond is not what other people have necessarily with their mothers. And so, you know, getting to know her in the last few years, it really kind of just, I think I grew as a woman.

6:55I just understood how great it was to be a woman. You know, it was just something about connecting with her and I don't even know what that is exactly. I can't pinpoint it. But she had it tough. She had kids. She wanted to go on in school. Is that right? Well, I guess when she met my dad, she had been working on a master's degree. And I only bring that up because we never heard that at all until the last few years. She never even brought it up. So what was home like for you growing up? It was very crowded. I'd sat on the floor a lot. We had to crawl under the dinner table to get to our seats if you were one of the smaller kids in the family.

7:36Not a lot of money, but we grew up like right next to the woods. And my mom grew up, her father worked in the woods. And that was like, you know, many, many, many, many generations of French settlers that worked in the woods. We should mention this is in Maine. Right, yes. And she's very connected to nature. So, like, we just learned all the bird songs and learned all the names of the flowers and learned all the trees. And, you know, we were just really, it was just part of how we lived. I didn't really think of it as anything particularly special until I got older. And I realized that a lot of that stuff's gone away for a lot of people.

8:18Also gave you ideas for 30 years of songs, I think. There's just so much nature in your writing. including and we'll get to the new album as well. So when did music enter your life when you were a kid? Well, my mother's voice. She comes from a family of people that knew how to sing. And my father, they didn't have a particularly musical, trained, formal musical life. My father's the son of Irish people. And so there's definitely that thing in there for him, too. But she always had a voice that was just buttery and beautiful. I remember, like, some of my earliest memories are her standing in a doorway.

9:05There were four bunk beds, and my sisters and I were all in them. And she was singing. And it was, like, magical. Would she sing you to sleep? Yeah. She sang, you know, hymns. And in French, that was her first language. So we heard those old things that she got when she was a kid. And did you have music through the Catholic Church as well? Or was that not a... Well, yeah. That wasn't as interesting to me at the time as my mom. I didn't recognize, like I remember realizing at one point that not everybody's mom sang like that. You know, I was a lot older. Oh, wow. You know what? But I wouldn't be singing if it weren't for hearing her voice.

9:49Did she ever teach you songs? Yeah, well, we would make up songs together when I was really little, yeah. So when did you start? What was your first instrument? My first instrument was the flute because it was the one, the instrument that was available in the elementary school band. Yeah. It was good old days where they would just send students into a room and say, just pick up something. I think, you know, my sister had one she was using. That's what it was. She actually wanted to play the flute, and she had borrowed one or something from a high school. And so I decided to try my hand at it. And I could make it sing, you know, but it just didn't have enough variety of sound to a flute.

10:38So when did the guitar start? When I was a teenager. I bought a Hohner guitar for like half of my savings account, which was probably$100. Was it at a local music store or mail order? Yeah, it was at a local music store in the next town over from where I grew up in Bangor, Maine. And I met a guitar teacher there and started taking lessons. And I just wanted to, I knew I wanted to sing. That was really where I went to after the flute. I wanted a saxophone. It was not going to happen. There were none available, too expensive. And so, because I thought that had the kind of tones that it would feel really good.

11:18So I just tried to train my voice to have more of those tones. You know, starting at a pretty young age, started just sitting inside my closet and singing, you know, to myself. But you wanted to have an instrument. But I needed an instrument to write songs with it. And so I practiced the guitar as much as I could. You know, it was one of those guitars where the strings are about an inch off of the neck, you know, really hurt your fingers. Get really strong hands. Yeah. Right. Were you listening to radio at this point? Was there any, what music was coming in that sort of fed that? God, the music was great all the way through growing up.

11:56I mean, we, I just looked at who was out there singing and I can't believe how lucky I was. just starting with like Motown on the radio when I was a really little, you know, Smokey Robinson. And, you know, that was what I was really into when I was small. And music with voices, with beautiful voices and interesting lyrics. And then I sort of moved on to The Beatles and, you know, after they broke up and Rikki Lee Jones made her way into that mix, you know, at some point when I was a teenager. And there's a huge list of them, you know, It would take me a long time to name them all. Now, did you think this would be a career for you?

12:37Was there a part of you that thought, no, music's going to be my life? I remember being really little and thinking, having a very direct thought. What I love to do more than anything is sing and also write poems. I wrote poetry when I was really little, and I thought maybe there's something there. And I went after the singing because I don't have a naturally powerful voice. I have to exercise, train like an athlete with my voice to get it to work. I always think of you as being a powerhouse. I think particularly to your first album. Yeah, that was just being in really good. I was just tuned up.

13:18I built it that way. You had what people consider a late start. You were in your 30s, I think, when your first album came out. I guess that is a late start. How long had you been singing before your first album came out? I'd been working on singing all through my life, you know, and taking time to sing with certain singers on records. And I was in love with Whitney Houston because she was like my age. I got to see her when she was 21 years old in Boston Common. And it was like magic, you know, the voice coming out of her. And there's just so many great singers to study and learn different things from.

13:56and Aretha Franklin and Etta James and, you know, the great singers like that. I studied a lot when I was younger. And Patsy Cline. I just wanted to strengthen my voice and just nothing made me feel better than that in my whole life. So the stronger it got, the more it flowed, the more I could do with it, the better I felt in the world. When was the first time you went out on stage? The first time I was still in high school, I think my guitar teacher, he was playing at a Ramada Inn in Bangor, Maine. And I got up and I did Chuckie's In Love with him. And then when did you start doing it solo? Not until my later 20s.

14:46It was really hard for me to do that. I went to an open mic night and it sounded like this because I was just so afraid of singing. Was this in Boston? Yeah. What did you tell yourself to be able to get up there and do that? Well, I had a guitar teacher, another guitar teacher that I would show up at a guitar lesson and play him a new song. He'd go, that's really great. You should get gigs. But I really wanted him to come with me. And so I finally wore him down and he did. So he kind of launched that duo, me with a duo. And then I just started doing it on my own after a while. John Curtis was his name.

15:27You must have been doing something right. You got scouted very soon after you started playing. Yeah. And signed a record deal. Well, I had been playing. And then at a certain point, I feel like the songwriting kind of kicked in. Like, you know, you're just sort of practicing, practicing, practicing. You know, like you go to art school and you learn how to paint. You do these things over and over and over and over again. And suddenly something comes into the painting. You know, it's sort of like that's how it was with the music. I felt like I wasn't, I was starting to understand how these songs that I really loved might have occurred.

16:08You mean other people's songs? Yeah. I always go back to Tears of a Clown. It's like a miraculous song, which was co-written with Stevie Wonder, actually, and Smokey Robinson. But there's like such a way that that flows melodically. And then lyrically, it's magical as well. I mean, it's a painting. It's a beautiful painting. Like, how the hell do people do that? You know what I mean? And I don't really know how you do that. But I understand how something can just kind of come out of you. Right. You know, and it just, for me, it just took years and years and years of going through the motions of, and, you know, trying and, you know, trying and trying and trying.

16:52And then it just kind of started, they started showing up. Now, were you, I'm fascinated by this. Would you try and break down that song? Like, what does the melody do here? No, no. It wasn't anything formal like that. No, no. I do a little bit of that now. I mean, now I listen to Tears of a Clown, for example. Probably one of my favorite songs. I'm blown away by the structure. You just can't believe how incredible the choices are for melody. And it just kind of probably came out of them like that. You know, they just probably, now it goes here and now it goes here. And now the words say this.

17:25And, you know, it's just, I would love to know how that was when they wrote that song. We'll be back with more from Patti Griffin after the break. Do you ever wish your office felt better? Buzzy Space designs furniture and acoustic solutions that make workspaces more comfortable, more creative, and more fun. If you need a quiet corner to focus or a collaborative space to brainstorm, Buzzy Space has you covered. Head to buzzy.space to check out their innovative solutions and make your office a place people actually love coming to. That's B-U-Z-Z-I dot space. Now thinking about your first album, your first song on that album is Moses.

18:10and immediately when people hear that you start on a suspended chord. Did you study theory? Did you know that? No, I don't. But it's got a very particular, I mean it showcases your voice but you're not starting on a chord tone. Yeah. I think there's a lot, probably one of the good things is that I don't know a lot of what I'm doing so I end up doing things. Buddy Miller once said to me, a great Buddy Miller said, I said, Patty, I love watching you play guitar because everything you do is so wrong. And it gives me all kinds of great ideas. And I'm like, okay, that's a compliment. I think it's a high compliment, actually.

18:52I think you know a little more than you're letting on. No, I really don't. I really don't. I can find a G. I can find an E. I can find an F and an A and a D. But as far as the theory goes, I'm just always hunt and peck on that stuff. But you're often finding those tones, those notes that aren't in the chord, that really color the chord. And it's literally the first note you sing on that record. It's just so powerful. I didn't know that. You didn't? No. Is this news to you? Well, I mean, my mother actually, back to my mom, explained to me that when I was younger and she would be singing, that I would automatically find harmonies to her voice when I would sing with her, which I didn't know I was doing, but apparently I did.

19:45So I love to dig around. I love to fish around and find my own harmonies. I'm not too crazy about doing like classic harmonies because, you know, you have to stick to one little line and you're over here and you stay there on the fourth or the fifth and I'm not as good at that. I don't enjoy it as much. And it's also studied and you have to be able to. I really don't have an understanding of how one would even go about learning that. Okay. What was it like for you, and I'm going to jump ahead because you sang with Emmylou Harris. You sang Trapeze. Yeah. Because she is the gold standard for duet singing.

20:27What was that like? Well, by then I'd known Emmy for a really long time. And we'd already sung on a bunch of other things. So it was just like having my buddy come to the studio and sing. So it was natural. Yeah. You just let her go. She does her thing. And just let her roll back when she wants to roll back and do things over. you know just let her do her thing she really she has an idea of what she wants to wants it to be and she's feeling her way through it you just let her stay out of her way that first album you did a whole produced album I think was Niall Rogers the producer no well I did a project with Niall Rogers here in the 90s which went absolutely nowhere he had a record label for like two minutes called Ear Candy.

21:20He wanted me to make records for that label. And I was just in way over my head. And I was not prepared to work with someone of his kind of technical caliber. And we didn't know how to communicate in the studio with each other. And so that didn't go very well. But then I made a record with Malcolm Byrne, who was, you know, from that whole New Orleans, Daniel Lenoir, Mark Howard, Kemp. And that was, you know, trial by fire. That was really like, I don't know what I'm doing either. And I'm like living in a studio in New Orleans for a month with all these people. And by the time that record was finished and mixed, my record company had had it.

22:07They didn't like any of the things that he did. And I wasn't really crazy about it either because I had been so tired and confused making the record the whole time. They just didn't hear me on it. You know, David Andrew Lee was the head of A &R at A &M Records. And I got called out to California quite a few times in those early days. Here's how we see this. You know, they really were great at trying to help you get there. because I think a lot of people would have went, well, that record's fine, let's put it out and then nobody's going to care about it and then we'll just drop her and then we'll be on our way.

22:45But he actually wanted to help me get my feet on the ground as a working artist. And he knew it was new for me, I think. And he really, I think he did me a favor when he rejected that record because it made me go out as vulnerable as I possibly could. You know, I was kind of experiencing a big depression at the end of that thing. And I just said, I don't know how I'm going to make another record. It's going to cost me like another, you know, whatever to do it. And you love these demos. Why we not just put demos out, you know, put these demos that you love so much, these things that, you know, they play them on the radio, on small radio, why can't you just...

23:26So he did what nobody was doing, and he put a record out of new artists just doing guitar and voice. and it really was the most honest way to put me out there and it was really great for me to have to tour solo for years and I got my legs on stage doing that. It's a great way to, you really have to get your shit together unless you want people to throw things at you, you know. So it was one of the best things that ever happened to me. But it must have been terrifying at the time. It was weird, yeah. Yeah, it was weird to be. And now, you know, I know musician friends who listen to the first record and they go, oh, I totally get what you should have done with that.

24:08And I'm like, where were you back then, you know? You should have done with it. I mean, it's an incredible first record, though. The songs on it are. They were definitely meant to be produced. They were written to be arranged. But I didn't know how to do that at the time. Did you want to learn how to arrange after that? I did. And I do. And I think I have really good ideas. But I think when it comes to my own stuff, I need someone from the outside to come and help me. Because I can't hold that perspective that you need. And there are great songs on it. There's Let Them Fly, which a lot of people have covered.

24:48Time Will Do The Talking, which I love. Thank you. And then there's a couple songs. There's one about your mother, Sweet Lorraine. Yeah. And I don't know if Poor Man's House is about you growing up particularly. but it's an amazing song. Tell me about those songs. Poor Man's House, that one was written, I was living in Jamaica Plain in Boston, and that was just about a mile away from where my grandparents, my Irish grandparents, were servants on an estate. I think they worked for the Roebuck's, like the Sears and Roebuck family. Oh, is that right? Okay. Yeah. And I realized, like, so much of the way I was, I was now working in Boston serving people, and I just thought that's funny.

25:35I wonder if they knew that was going to happen. I was going to be a mile away. Their granddaughter would be a mile away from where they had lived and died. And I realized that, you know, when the object is to sort of survive and get your family to survive, that you have – there are people whose entire lives are that bare minimum. And I was sort of born into this very rare moment, I think, where I could start and place where I could really think about what I really wanted to do and try to do it and maybe manage to do it. And I realized what a contrast that was. And there was also this thing in me that didn't feel like I felt like I was just spending a lot of time with fluff because of that.

26:19And I wasn't really out there trying to make a family and, you know, trying to do all the things that they had lived to do. Oh, you thought you were just doing fluff. I noticed that we weren't allowed in our, you know, if you're from that background, you're not necessarily, You don't feel like you're necessarily allowed into this world of the arts and this world of entertainment, especially. It's something that other people do that have maybe more advantages than you and, you know, don't have to worry so much about money. And you know what I mean? And you are, your job is to be the person that serves them.

26:55You know, I realized that my family's mindset was that through the experiences that they'd had for so many generations on both sides of my family of being really poor. So that was what Poor Man's House grew out of was this sudden, you know, I went to see the estate where they had worked and that just haunted me for weeks and weeks. And being there, just the experience of being there and seeing the servants' quarters and it was just the sadness that haunted me. So when you say you had trouble getting up on stage, was some of that feeling? Yeah, you're not. Is that what informed that? Yeah. Your job is to go and hand people things that they need.

27:41By then, I'd been waiting on people for quite a while. And I love service, by the way. I love it. The only thing I don't love about service is the way that you are vulnerable to being treated by others because people don't recognize it as a really wonderful thing to do and know how to do well. I'll bet you you're a good tipper to this day. I am. Yeah. Yeah. You got to really, really mess up for me to get you down to 20%. And then tell me about Sweet Lorraine. Well, that came out of a conversation that I had with my mom. I was getting divorced around that time. And she talked to me for the first time about her wedding day.