Patty Griffin’s Life Fell Apart. Rebuilding Gave Her Music a Jolt.
During the last 16 years, the singer-songwriter lost her voice, her parents and her relationship. She captures her period of crisis and rebirth on “Crown of Roses.”
By Grayson Haver Currin
Patty Griffin did not intend to embarrass her mother on her debut album.
In the early ’90s, Griffin recorded a series of simple demos to get gigs within Boston’s songwriter circuit. She had written “Sweet Lorraine” — a biographical snapshot of her mother’s rough-and-tumble upbringing — in a flash. But as hubbub grew about the diminutive redhead with the enormous voice, every label interested in Griffin demanded that “Sweet Lorraine” appear on her 1996 debut, “Living With Ghosts.” She’d never thought Lorraine would hear it.
“She was so angry, and now that I’m older, I don’t blame her,” Griffin said recently during a video interview from her home in Austin, as her dog, Buster, nuzzled her. “That was stepping across a line.”
On her 10 albums since that debut, Griffin has pinballed between post-grunge rock and graceful folk, between Spanish balladry and sizzling blues, even duetting with Mavis Staples before cutting a country-gospel wonder in Nashville. As she wrote about civil rights and bigotry, adventure and lust, she continued to examine her difficult childhood and relationship with Lorraine in many of her most tender but tough songs.
Those family tunes culminate on her new album, “Crown of Roses,” out July 25, with the arresting “Way Up to the Sky.” On “Sweet Lorraine,” she blamed her mother’s problems on her past. But on “Way Up to the Sky,” Griffin shoulders some of the blame, singing about being the youngest of seven children who rarely made their mother feel valued amid a collapsing marriage in a cash-strapped household held together by Catholicism and convenience. Lorraine never heard “Way Up to the Sky.” She died in February at 93.
“I wanted to know all the secret stuff in her heart, what those days were like when she was sad and lost and broke and unappreciated,” Griffin, 61, said with a rueful chuckle. “It was hard to get that close to it, because she had been so angry with us for so long — especially me.”
Griffin hopes that her mother’s death and “Crown of Roses” are the capstone of a nearly two-decade period she calls “the come apart.” It began around 2009, when she joined Band of Joy, the rekindled project of the Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant, whom she dated for several years. Then her father, Lawrence, died. She and Plant broke up. Her dogs died. She got breast cancer, lost her voice, made an album before she was comfortable singing again and began traveling to Maine monthly to serve as one of her mother’s caretakers. So much of that turmoil is woven into “Crown of Roses,” eight tracks about family, love and politics that play out as country waltzes, little symphonies and jagged blues.
“There is no one place in the human condition she has not exposed us to,” Plant, who appears on the album, said in an email. “Sometimes with tenderness, with family and loss, sometimes with fierce poignant critique, her wordplay is profound, challenging and unrivaled.”
After Griffin’s father died in September 2009, she was the only child with the kind of flexible schedule that allowed her to stay in Maine for a while. She canceled a show and went back to her childhood home. “She looked at me like she’d drawn the short straw — ‘Oh, man, it’s Patty? Anybody but Patty,’” she said of Lorraine. “I realized that I was going to have to get to work on that.”
As a child, their relationship had been volatile. Lorraine was pursuing her master’s degree before starting a family, but her life had become an endless litany of laundry, cooking and errands. She fell into depression, the kids often finding her asleep on the couch after school.
Still, Griffin loved to hear Lorraine sing as she did household chores, her renditions of Broadway tunes and French hymns so beautiful that Griffin once mistook an Ella Fitzgerald record for her mother’s voice. “It was the best thing that happened every day, when she sang,” Griffin said. “It was like someone putting hot chocolate in front of you when you’re a little kid and it’s cold.”
Music soon became Griffin’s favorite thing — first the Beatles, then Led Zeppelin, Tom Waits and Earth, Wind & Fire. Partly inspired by Lorraine, partly inspired by Aretha Franklin’s rapturous reimagining of “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” she devoted herself to becoming a singer at 12. Songwriting, she said, steadily became her religion, a way to “discover things and examine mystery.”
For decades, Griffin worked through her complicated feelings about her mother by singing about them. She recounted her rage in “Mother of God,” reconstructed a memory about their best childhood year together in “Burgundy Shoes.” “In my 30s, I listened to Patty’s songs as my own version of therapy — therapy on the cheap,” said Eileen Griffin, one of Griffin’s older sisters. “It was validating. It helped me process my experiences, too.”
Griffin and Lorraine finally began processing their experiences together during that stint in 2009. During the pandemic, they talked every day, occasionally spending two hours playing word games on the phone, almost like old friends. It took nearly 60 years, but Griffin finally felt unconditional love for Lorraine. As the end neared, they had a rapport and an understanding, so clear in “Way Up to the Sky.”
“What I tried to do was be there for her,” said Griffin, her bracelets jangling as she laughed. “Lots of times, she just wanted to sit and watch MSNBC. I can’t say I did that perfectly. I drank some wine here or there, you know? But I wanted to let her be who she wanted to be.”
Griffin was simultaneously figuring out who she wanted to be, too. In 2016, after a series of ceaseless colds, she was diagnosed with cancer. Radiation hamstrung her voice so much that, at a show in Washington, D.C., Griffin stepped up to the microphone, and nothing came out. At another point, while trying to push her diaphragm into one of her trademark soaring notes, she flared out a rib that still won’t go down. On her self-titled 2019 album, she sounded barely there.
The loudspeaker she’d built in her body, as she put it, was gone. Griffin, though, has been cancer free for nine years and called herself a “gym rat” now, intent on rebuilding strength. “In 1993, I was waiting on tables and frustrated with my life and needed to sing really loud,” she said. “That was over, but I needed to find out what being vulnerable with my music was now.”
Griffin’s earliest records could suggest Emmylou Harris, Bruce Springsteen and Shirley Manson within three tracks. But after several frustrating rounds of label restructuring in the late ’90s, she shifted into softer folk-rock instrumentation and more straightforward songwriting as the new millennium began. It was a budgetary consideration that also proved marketable. The sound became a stylistic cloister, one that was so confining she daydreamed about blowing up her life and career by buying a trailer in rural Oklahoma. She wanted another way to exist.
But then came Plant, cancer, her mother’s sickness and death, the whole “come apart.” Recognizing how much was out of her control, she started to loosen up, to laugh a little more at the world. She learned to do more with a smaller voice and to write to the sound of it again, as she had done in the ’90s. And for the first time in years, she started finishing songs that said and did exactly what she wanted.
Where “Way Up to the Sky” mirrored “Sweet Lorraine” with only an acoustic guitar, “I Know a Way” became a sultry strut about lost opportunities and second chances, her voice rising to its current heights. “Long Time” is a haunted acoustic blues, summoning the existential moans of Skip James. As Griffin’s voice briefly rises from a hushed prayer into a yell, Plant echoes her — fitting for the man she teasingly nicknamed “The God of Destruction,” since he helped usher her toward so much chaos. It’s a song about perseverance, about moving forward through the dark.
“It was this pile of things, forcing change,” Griffin said. “It was like nature taking its course, trying to get me to do naturally what I’m built to do. Everything fell apart — and that was a good thing.”