December 30, 2025 • 44 mins
When Patty 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's 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.
On today's episode, Bruce Headlam talks to Patty 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 enduring songs. And she 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.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite songs from Patty Griffin HERE.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When Patty Griffin released a 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
(00:36):
with the wisdom and craft of an artist who spent
nearly three decades refining her voice. That voice first emerged
in nineteen ninety six with Living with Ghosts, recorded on
a simple four track in her Bosson 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
(00:56):
by everyone from The Chicks to Solomon Burke, while her
own recordings have earned her multiple Grammy nominations and a
reputation as a songwriter songwriter. On today's episode, Bruce Sedlam
talks to pay Patty Griffin about the inspiration behind Crown
of Roses and how grit has shaped her songwriting throughout
her career. They also discussed her early days in Boston's
(01:18):
folks Seeing 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.
(01:41):
Here's Bruce Headlam with Patty Griffin.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So, Patty Griffin, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I was looking this up. Your first album came out
twenty nine years ago.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Twenty nine years ago? And I, well, I can't think
of a better songwriter over that period of time. Thank you. Wow,
maybe somebody else did.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Thank you?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Okay, Well I can't so go over your list later.
But my list starts with you. And you've got a
new album called Crown of Roses.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Can you talk a little bit about what you were
thinking going into this album? What led up to you
doing this album?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
This album, there's a lot going on in my life
for the last ten years. It 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. You know, this is 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,
(02:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
You know, how's your take changed.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
I don't need hope to be hopeful. Does that make
any sense at all? I feel like just the opposite
of that set up and makes me feel like 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, and you know,
sort of just getting that in my bones has been
(03:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So it's a little apocalyptic this album, is it? Yeah,
You've got well in the sense that the apocalypse is
also kind of a new beginning. And the first song
is yeah back at the start, you have birds disappearing,
you have songs called the end. It's really a I'll
(03:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
I think that's 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 of the plants are under siege,
(04:31):
and it makes sense that I would also be experiencing
things that way.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
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. Yeah, what do
you think prompted that?
Speaker 3 (04:57):
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 the amazing creature that had been there all
along that didn't know how to come out because she
you know, women, especially from her generation, they just kind
(05:20):
of got passed over for their own understanding of how
of their contributions and their power was really you know,
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,
(05:46):
you know, and stronger than anybody had ever really met.
She grew up in poverty, she put herself through college,
She got married in the fifties and went straight into
having seven babies in seven years and stayed pregnant for
seven years, and then was just overwhelmed with that for
a long time. And I think, you know that the
(06:09):
fine tuning motherhood thing never happened with me because I
was number seven, you know what I mean. So 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 necessary with their mothers, And so,
you know, getting to know her in the last few years,
(06:29):
it really kind of just I think I grew as
a woman. I just understood how great it was to
be a woman.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
It was just something about connecting with her, and I
don't even know what that is exactly, I can't pinpoint it.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
But she had a tough she had kids, she wanted
to go on in school.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Was 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, Like, she never
even brought it up.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
So what was home like for you growing up?
Speaker 3 (07:05):
It was very crowded. It 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. Not 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
(07:27):
generations of French settlers that worked in the woods. So
you just mentioned right, yes, And she's very connected to nature.
So like we just learned all the birds 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
(07:47):
think of it as anything particularly special until I got
older and I realized that a lot of that stuff's
gone away.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
For a lot of people and also gave you ideas
for thirty years of songs, I think because there's so
much nature in your yeah, yeah writing, yeah, including and
we'll get to the new album as well. So when
did music enter your life when you were a kid?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
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 like Irish people, and so there's
definitely that thing in there for him too. But she
(08:35):
always had a voice that was just buttery and beautiful.
I remember, like some of my earliest memories are her
standing in a doorway where there are four bunk beds in.
My sisters and I were all in them, and she
was singing, and it was like magical.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Would she sing you to sleep?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Yeah? She sang, you know, hymns and like in French.
She that was her first language. So we heard those
old things that she got when she was a kid.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And did you have music through the Catholic church as
well or.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Is 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, I wouldn't be
singing if it weren't for hearing her voice.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Did she ever teach you songs?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Uh? Yeah, well we would make up songs together when
I was really little.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, so when did you start? What was your first instrument?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
My first instrument was the flute because it was the
one the instrument that was available in the elementary school band.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah, it was good old days where they would just
send students into a room and say, just pick up something.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
I think.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
My sister had one. It's so accusing, that's what it was.
She actually wanted to play the flute, and she had
borrowed one or something from the 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.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
So when did the guitar start?
Speaker 3 (10:20):
When I was a teenager, I bought a Honer guitar
for like half of my savings account, which was probably
one hundred dollars and uh.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Was it at a local music store mail order Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
It was a local music store 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 couldn't get. I wanted a saxophone. It was not
going to happen. They were none available, too expensive, and
(10:53):
so because I thought that had the kind of tones
that it would feel really good. So 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.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
You know, but you want to He wanted to have
an instrument, but.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I needed an instrument to write songs too with it.
And so I practiced the guitar as much as I could,
you know, as one of those guitars where the strings
are about an inch off of the neck, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
It really hurt your fingers, get really strong hands. Yeah,
we listening to radio at this point. Was there any
what music was coming in that sort of fed that
got it?
Speaker 3 (11:32):
The music was great all the way through growing up.
I 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, and I
was a really little you know, Smokey Robinson, and you know,
that was what I was really into. And I was
small and music with voices, with beautiful voices and interesting lyrics.
(11:56):
And then I sort of moved on to the Beatles,
and you know, after they broke up and Ricky Lee
Jones made her way into that mix. You know, at
some point when I was a teenager, and there's a
list of them, you know, it would take me a
long time to name them all.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Now, did you think this would be a career for you?
Did you? Was there part of you that thought, no,
music's going to be my life.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
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,
you know, And I went after the singing. Because I
don't have a naturally powerful voice. I have to exercise it,
(12:43):
you know, train like an athlete with my voice to
get it to work.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I always think of you as like sort of being
a powerhouse. I think particularly your first album.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, that was just being in really good. It was
just tuned up, you know. I built it that way.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
So you had what people consider a late start. You
were in your thirties. I think, Yeah, your first album
came that is late start. How long had you been
singing before your first album came out.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
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, she's like my age. I got to see
her when she was twenty one years old in Boston
Common and it was like magic, you know, the voice
(13:30):
coming out of her. And there's just so many great
singers to study and learn different things from, and Aretha
Franklin and Edna James and you know, the great singers
like that. I studied a lot when I was younger
and Patsy Kline. 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
(13:54):
it flowed, the more I could do with it, the
better I felt in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
When was the first time you went out on stage.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
The first time I was still in high school. I
think my guitar teacher. He was playing at a ramata
inn in Bangor, Maine, and I got up and I
did chuck, he's in love with him?
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, uh huh so okay, yeah? And then when did
you start doing it solo?
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Not until my later twenties. It was really hard for
me to do that, you know good. I went to
an open mic night and because I was just so
afraid of saying it.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
What was this in Boston?
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
What did you tell yourself to be able to get
up there and do that?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Well? I had a guitar teacher that another guitar teacher
that I would show up at, you know, a guitar lesson.
I'd play him a new song. You go, that's really great,
you should get gigs, and then I go. But I
really wanted him to come with me, and so I
finally wore him down and he did so he kind
of launched the duo with me with a duo, and
(15:00):
then I just started doing it on my own after
a while. John Curtis was his name.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
You must have been doing something right. You got scouted
fair soon after you were you started playing, yeah, and
signed a record deal.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
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're
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
(15:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
You mean other people's songs.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
I always go back to Tears of a Clown. It's
like a miraculous song, which was co written with Stevie
Wonder actually and Smoke Your RUMs and 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?
(16:12):
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,
and then it just kind of started they started showing up.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Now, well you I'm fascinated by this. Would you try
and break down that song? Like, what does the melody
do here? Wasn't anything formal like that?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
No, No, I do a little bit of that now.
I mean now I listened to Tears of the 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 and it just kind
of probably came out of them like that. You know,
they just probably now it goes here, and now it
(17:02):
goes here, and now the words say this, and you know,
it's just I would love to know how that was
when they wrote that song.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
We'll be back with more from Patty Griffin after the break.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Now, thinking about your first album, your first song is
on that album as Moses, And immediately when people hear that,
you start on a suspended chord? Did you study theory?
Did you know that? But it's got a it's got
a very particular I mean, it showcases your voice, but
you're not starting on a chord tone.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
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. Great. Buddy Miller said, Patty,
I love watching you play guitar because everything you do
is so wrong and it gives me all kinds of
great idea. And I'm like, Okay, that's that's that's a compliment.
(18:03):
I think it's a high compliment. Actually, okay, I.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Think I think you know a little more than you're
letting on.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I think 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 you know what
I mean. I just but as far as the theory goes,
I'm just always like hunt and peck on that stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
But you're often finding those those tones, those notes that
aren't in the chord, that like really color the chord.
And it's literally the first note you sang on that
on that record. It's just so powerful. I didn't know
that you didn't.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
No, I think it's neat 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 apparently I did. So I love to dig around.
(19:00):
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 stick to one
little line and you know you're over here and you
stay there on the fourth, you know 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
(19:23):
how one would even go about learning that.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Okay, what was it like for you? And I'm going
to jump ahead, because you sang with Emilu Harris, you
sing Trapez what was because she is the gold standard
for duet singing. What was that like?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Well, I know by then I'd known Emmy for a
really long time and we'd already sung on a bunch
of the others things, So it was just like having
my buddy come to the studio.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
And sing so as natural.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, you just like, you know, 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. I think she's feeling her way through it.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
You just let her.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, okay, stay out of her way.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That first album, you did a whole produced album, and
I think with Nile Rogers, the producer.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
No. Well, I did a project with Nile Rogers here
in the nineties which went absolutely nowhere. He had a
record label for like two minutes called ear Candy. He
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
(20:45):
technical caliber, and I didn't 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 Burn, who is you know from that whole
New Orleans Danny Lenwill Mark Howard Camp and that was,
you know, trial by fire. That was really like I
(21:08):
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. They
didn't like any of the things that he did. And
that wasn't really crazy about it either, because I had
been so tired and confused making the record the whole time.
(21:30):
They just didn't hear me on it.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
You know.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
David Anderley was the head of A and R at
A and M Records, and I got called out to
California quite a few times in those early days. Here's
how this, 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 final, just put it out and then nobody's
(21:54):
going to care about it, and then we'll just drop
her and then we'll be on our way. But 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 favor when he rejected that record, because
it made me go out as vulnerable as it possibly could.
(22:15):
You know, it 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
(22:36):
they play him on the radio on small radio. Why
can't you just So 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.
(23:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
But it must have been terrifying at the time.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
It was weird. Yeah, it was weird to be And now,
you know, I know musician friends who listen to the
first record and I go, oh, I totally get what
you should have done with that. Where were you back then?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
You know you should have done with it. I mean
that's an incredible first record. Though the songs on it are.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
They were definitely meant to be produced. They're written to
be arranged, but I didn't know how to do that
at the time.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Did you want to learn how to arrange after that?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
I did, and I and I do, and I think
I have really good ideas, but I think there are
when it comes to my own stuff, I need someone
from the outside to come and help me, because you know,
I can't hold that perspective you know that you need.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
And there are I mean, there are great songs on it.
There's let Them Fly, which a lot of people have covered.
Time Will Do the Talking, which I love, 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 it's an amazing song.
(24:16):
Tell me about those songs.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Poor Man's House. That one was written. I was living
in Jamaica Plane in Boston, and that was just about
about a mile away from where my grandparents. My Irish
grandparents were servants on an estate. I think they worked
for the Roebucks, like the series of Robuts family and yeah,
(24:39):
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. I 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
(25:01):
and get your family to survives that you have, there
are people whose entire lives are that bare minimum. 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 managed to do it.
(25:22):
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, and 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.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Oh, you thought you were just doing fluff.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
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,
(26:02):
and you know what I mean, and you are your
job is to be the person that serves them, you know.
I realized that 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. It was
(26:23):
a 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.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
So when you say you had trouble getting up on stage,
was some of that feeling.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I would inform that.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, you should, you should. Your job is to go
and hand people things and that they need. And then
by 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
(27:09):
because people don't recognize it as a really wonderful thing
to do and know how to do well.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I'll bet you you're a good tipper to this day.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
I am.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Yeah, you got to really really mess up for me
to get you down to twenty percent.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
And then tell me about sweet Lorraine.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
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. The day before. She had her father,
who was this woodsman. He came in from the woods
every so often and kind of turned everybody's world upside
down and then went back to the woods, very heavy
(27:51):
drinker and a wild kind of guy. And she met
my dad and then started seeing my dad and then
very quickly got married. And he made some comment to
her at their sort of rehearsal dinner, I guess that
she must be pregnant, and then he went into calling
her some really bad names and they should never say
(28:14):
to your daughter. And the day of the wedding, my
dad tried to get out of it because he was
terrified getting married. So she's like, I mean, it's funny
now because I wasn't there. It wasn't me. But like,
she's gone through, she's made her wedding dress, she's gone
through all of this stuff. Should do this thing that
(28:36):
she wasn't even sure she wanted to do because she
was really doing all right on her own. And then
the next thing, you know, this guy who says really
horrible things to her is the guy that gives her
away to this guy who wants to get out of it,
you know. So it's like she just went there's no
way we're not doing this now because she just had it.
(28:57):
You know, with men, we're definitely getting married. You're gonna
marry me, and that's too bad, you know. So you
know my mom now looking back now, especially because I
know her in a different way, I know her as
a force of nature. Now, that was quite something for
a force of nature to be given away by a
drunk guy to somebody who was too scared to even
(29:18):
do what he'd asked her to do in the first place.
And she'd gone all to this great trouble of bringing herself.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
To Was she telling you this because in some way
she admired you for being forgetting a divorce.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
No, she didn't. She was. She's Catholic. My parents were
Catholic and they really she was against the divorce. I
was not Catholic at this point, so I didn't have
any problem getting divorced. But she really thought you stay
in your marriage.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
So the next few albums you did Flaming Red, A
Thousand Kisses, Impossible Dream, you know, those albums to me,
captured that alternative country sound. Did you hear in so
many you know? You hear in the Robert Plant that
kind of t bone Burnett, you know, the kind of
(30:09):
softer percussion, a lot of feedback. Those are the records
to me that really solidified that sound. That's rights where
that sound? Is that something you wanted? Is that? How
involved were you with that production?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
I was very involved with all of those productions. Jay
Joyce did Flaming Red, then I did A Thousand Kisses
with Doug Lancio and that by a Thousand Kisses, I
was off record labels, so I was I had to
make something on the cheap, which is why we shrunk
everything down to the bare minimum. We got an ensemble,
(30:47):
you know, and did a classic kind of ensemble kind
of record like they would have done in the fifties,
you know what I mean, our forties. We're just everybody's
you know, we have a xylophone, you know what I mean.
And we're going to use this through the whole record
because we had a very very tight budget. I haven't
ever set out to do anything that I've done. I
(31:09):
do set out to try to do things. I never
feel like I'm my authentic me, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Really it's got to come to you.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Was it a lot of live playing in the studio? Yeah,
and then were you was doing the singing on top
later or No.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
We did a lot of stuff, especially A thousand kisses.
We did everything, guitar voice, you know. I did it
in like a couple of days. You know, it's it's
not a big long record, and I had lots of
time to get ready for it because I wasn't on
a label anymore. So it was just I just had
myself together because I knew we need to not spend
(31:48):
a lot of money. I went in there and just
kind of put the basics down and then Doug painted
over that. But Jay Joyce, that was a whole other
can of worms. The way he works, but it also
very quickly recorded.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
You had been playing for so long solo or maybe
with one other guitarist to sing with a band, as
you started with on Flaming Red, what was that like?
Speaker 3 (32:12):
I honestly felt like I was more powerful by myself,
Like you have to sing differently with the band because
they're doing the passion, so you have to step back.
To me, my mind always went, oh, that vocal now
has to step back a little bit, and they take
the emotional thing and they play it. So if we're
(32:36):
all doing that, it's going to be it'lbeit shit show,
you know. So I always felt like I had more
less control over how it was going to go on
stage until very recently. Yeah, I've been working with and
that's that's not anything on the bands that I worked
with had. I worked with this great guitar player, Doug Lancey,
(32:58):
who was my band leader for years, and he would
just chase me around like if I wasn't in tune,
he'd get out of tune and find, you know, and
just follow me everywhere. But I still didn't really get
into learning how to be play with people until the
last probably ten or fifteen years with David Polkingham. He's
really been the guy that has been just patiently helped
(33:21):
me figure out how to ask for what I want
and try to achieve it.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
You know, that's interesting. So when you some of those songs,
if you went out by yourself, it was almost a
relief to sing them. Yeah, when you're doing solo yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
And now it's the other way around.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
I really want to want to hide behind those guys.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
After this last break, we'll be back with Patty Griffin.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
You know what I mentioned at people I was talking
to you, everybody said, please ask her about, Please ask
her about. So I do have some greatest hits. I
have to ask you about long Ride Home. I always
thought that was from a man's point of view. It is,
it is. You're very good at singing from a man's
point of view.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I know something wrong with me.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
No, No, like like your cover of the Springsteen song
Stolen Cars is perfect.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Well there, you know, And there's a whole world of
gender fluid out there which has a whole other take
on that too, I'm sure, but I never felt like
there should be it should be limited to your gender
as as far as characters go. You know, you don't
ask writers you're writing fiction, to only write if they're man,
(34:42):
only write about man at the women to write you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh recently, yes, they have asked that, but general.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah, maybe that's a good idea.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Actually, was that was any of that taken from an experience?
Or that was that was just a story you imagined.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
I bought a guitar from Groom's Guitar store in Nashville.
It was still my main guitar. It's Gibson nineteen sixty
five J fifty and I just bought it, went sat
down at a kitchen table in Nashville and wrote that song.
It just kind of came out of the guitar. And
(35:19):
it's definitely based on you know, people that some people
I know, and what was happening in my life at
the time.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Are you the kind that works every day, like you
sit down every day with no, no.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
No, Not anymore. I used to. I used to be
like kind of obsessive about that, and I needed a
break from that. And I haven't really resumed the work level.
I'm not sure I will. I mean, I'm older now too,
and there's a lot I want to do.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
In the world besides songwriting.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Beside songwriting and it's very you know, it does take
up a lot of space when you do it. I
really enjoyed writing these last songs for this record because
I took a lot of songs that are on this
record or things that I had written and chucked out
and I just thought, oh, that's terrible, it's terrible, and
(36:10):
checked another one out. And then I kind of went
through the voice memos at a certain point and went,
that's not why to throw that out, Like I'd want
to hear how this turns out, you know what I mean?
So so I didn't. When I finished writing this record,
it was really just sort of almost like facing myself.
Everybody gets stuck in things, and sometimes you know you're
stuck in something and you're willing to stay stuck.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Damn it. You know, we're definitely was it in your
writing you felt stuck?
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yeah. I didn't want to write cleverly. I wanted things
to be really basic and straight from my gut.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
You're writing reminds me a lot of Leonard Cohen's right, Wow,
have you heard that?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
No?
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Thank you? Okay, and you're a Canadian, so thank you.
That's really absolutely I'm an honor.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yeah, that's like saying you Wow, stick handle, like Wayne
Gretzky's can I Ask You about? A couple more songs
to get to the new album Okay, Useless Desires, which
I think is just a fabulous song.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
That was me experimenting with. I was working a lot
in Nashville. I was hearing all kinds of music that
I'd never heard before, and I was working with Emilu
Harris and she's amazing, but I didn't grow up listening
to Emulu, So I was like she. I was getting
exposed to this kind of music that I'd never really
listened to before and enjoying it. And I was actually
(37:37):
just trying to find a spot in my voice to
see what would feel like to sing, And that's the
song that kind of rolled out on me. It was
really more about a feeling I wanted to have in
my voice.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
When you're writing, the melodies come first before the chords before.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
The most of the time, I would say most of
the time, but not all the time.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We should mention you did Band of Joy, which was
step which is stepping back a little bit and being
part of an ensemble. What was was that a good experience?
What was that like?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
It was really good. I really he just wanted to
not have pressure on me of running the show and
just be part of the band, and I think that's
really where my personality is best suited as being on
a team. I met a movie director once and I said,
can I come and hang out and watch the guts
(38:28):
of a film? I just want to see what was
like back and he let me do that. I love
behind the scenes. I like being part of something that
supports I'm a better service person, more naturally suited to
it personality wise, I think. But at the same time,
I have my own stories that I want to tell.
So I didn't know where to go next musically, and
I really knew I wanted to make a change, and
(38:50):
I didn't know how to get there. And band a
joy without realizing it. Looking back, I think it was
me kind of just trying to shake myself up a
little bit and start moving into other directions, looking for
other things to do. And it was really really fun
and the band was amazing.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
So I do want to talk about the new album,
which a lot is about your mother, as you've written,
and when I was listening to it, I kept thinking
about I think my favorite song of yours, which is Mary,
thank you, and I'm going to start up? Can you
actually finish the chorus for me? I couldn't stay another day.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
I couldn't stay another day longer. He flies right by
and leaves a kiss upon her face while the angels
were I can't see that crazy seeing his praises in
a blaze of glory. Mary stayed behind and started cleaning up,
cleaning up the place. Yeah, that's definitely a theme.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But that is so I remember hearing that song for
the first time just being so.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Like, who's gonna, you know, who's sticking around to really
put life back together?
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah? No, And when I when I mentioned Leonard Cohen,
that's had he ever actually cleaned up, he might have
written yeah, but it is. It is such a great,
beautiful sort of encapsulation of that that role.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, that's a tricky spot for women too. That since
I've written it, I've thought about this a few times,
like if you put women like in this quiet kind
of stoic you know, we're just going to clean up
after you kind of stuff, you know. And I guess
when I wrote it, it was sort of like why why,
(40:35):
over and over again? Is this the pattern? I question it.
I think it just because things have always been the
way they've always been doesn't mean they have to stay
their destructive way, you.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Know, right. But you look back on your mother in
this record, in All the Way Home, which has a
line not the Life my Mother chose, Well.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
That song is not about my mom?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Oh was that not?
Speaker 3 (41:01):
No? No, no, that's like made up story, that's it?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Was that, right?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:05):
I just assumed it was about your mother. Yeah. I
do want to ask you. I think they're all beautiful songs.
Back at the start at the end, she said, sort
of slightly apocalyptic. Born in a Cage is a beautiful song.
And you were talking about birds in your youth.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
That grew the lyrics grew out of talking to my mom.
My mom noticed that she grew up in Maine, and
I remember there were like, you know, a bird feeder
would be out in the wintertime and there would just
be hundreds of little beautiful birds. And they have really
kind of their populations have really really diminished. She's just
(41:44):
not seeing some of the birds that she was used
to seeing twenty years before were just not coming back around.
And the Earth's taking a beating from us, and I
kind of put that in my mind with yet another
one of those moments that women are aware of and
(42:06):
kind of just accepting on a regular basis, But we
probably need to not be accepting it that the amount
of women disappearing on a regular basis daily in the world,
just disappearing, it's really similar. It's connected to the birds disappearing.
It's the same disease to me.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
So the last song on the album A word. How
about the last line on the album, which is but
I Will never stop loving you, which is a is
a surprise in the song because it doesn't start as
a love song. So who's that about everybody?
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Life? It really isn't about anybody in particular. It's really
about why I'm here. Just really done a lot of
thinking about why I'm here on earth, you know, in
the last few years, spending time with my mom. You know,
it's real honored to be with somebody when they're dying,
because they you end up kind of thinking about your
(43:05):
own stuff. And I just want to not be an asshole.
I want to support love. And sometimes I can go
through a day and really see how beautiful just about
everybody is and everything is. You know, some days sometimes
I can't do that at all. But that's my goal,
is to understand how precious it is and connected we
(43:29):
all are and everything is. And I know it sounds
awful woo woo, I'm sure, but it's really is actually
this thing that I try to.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Do that seems like a perfect place to start. Okay,
that was wonderful. Thank you so much, Thank you very much.
That was really wonderful.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Nice to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
And the episode description you'll find a link to Patti
Griffin's new album, Crown of Roses, as well as the
collection of songs over the course of her career. Be
sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record
Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be
sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod.
You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken
Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing
(44:09):
help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is
Ben Holliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If
you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing
to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that
offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety
nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions,
(44:29):
and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate,
and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's
by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
Pushkin. When Patty Griffin released a 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
(00:36):
with the wisdom and craft of an artist who spent
nearly three decades refining her voice. That voice first emerged
in nineteen ninety six with Living with Ghosts, recorded on
a simple four track in her Bosson 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
(00:56):
by everyone from The Chicks to Solomon Burke, while her
own recordings have earned her multiple Grammy nominations and a
reputation as a songwriter songwriter. On today's episode, Bruce Sedlam
talks to pay Patty Griffin about the inspiration behind Crown
of Roses and how grit has shaped her songwriting throughout
her career. They also discussed her early days in Boston's
(01:18):
folks Seeing 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.
(01:41):
Here's Bruce Headlam with Patty Griffin.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
So, Patty Griffin, thank you so much.
Speaker 3 (01:46):
Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
I was looking this up. Your first album came out
twenty nine years ago.
Speaker 3 (01:53):
Is that right?
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Twenty nine years ago? And I, well, I can't think
of a better songwriter over that period of time. Thank you. Wow,
maybe somebody else did.
Speaker 3 (02:05):
Thank you?
Speaker 2 (02:06):
Okay, Well I can't so go over your list later.
But my list starts with you. And you've got a
new album called Crown of Roses.
Speaker 3 (02:16):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Can you talk a little bit about what you were
thinking going into this album? What led up to you
doing this album?
Speaker 3 (02:24):
This album, there's a lot going on in my life
for the last ten years. It 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. You know, this is 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,
(02:46):
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.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
You know, how's your take changed.
Speaker 3 (03:00):
I don't need hope to be hopeful. Does that make
any sense at all? I feel like just the opposite
of that set up and makes me feel like 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, and you know,
sort of just getting that in my bones has been
(03:23):
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.
Speaker 2 (03:36):
So it's a little apocalyptic this album, is it? Yeah,
You've got well in the sense that the apocalypse is
also kind of a new beginning. And the first song
is yeah back at the start, you have birds disappearing,
you have songs called the end. It's really a I'll
(03:58):
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.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
I think that's 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 of the plants are under siege,
(04:31):
and it makes sense that I would also be experiencing
things that way.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
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. Yeah, what do
you think prompted that?
Speaker 3 (04:57):
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 the amazing creature that had been there all
along that didn't know how to come out because she
you know, women, especially from her generation, they just kind
(05:20):
of got passed over for their own understanding of how
of their contributions and their power was really you know,
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,
(05:46):
you know, and stronger than anybody had ever really met.
She grew up in poverty, she put herself through college,
She got married in the fifties and went straight into
having seven babies in seven years and stayed pregnant for
seven years, and then was just overwhelmed with that for
a long time. And I think, you know that the
(06:09):
fine tuning motherhood thing never happened with me because I
was number seven, you know what I mean. So 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 necessary with their mothers, And so,
you know, getting to know her in the last few years,
(06:29):
it really kind of just I think I grew as
a woman. I just understood how great it was to
be a woman.
Speaker 1 (06:39):
You know.
Speaker 3 (06:39):
It was just something about connecting with her, and I
don't even know what that is exactly, I can't pinpoint it.
Speaker 2 (06:44):
But she had a tough she had kids, she wanted
to go on in school.
Speaker 3 (06:48):
Was 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, Like, she never
even brought it up.
Speaker 2 (07:01):
So what was home like for you growing up?
Speaker 3 (07:05):
It was very crowded. It 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. Not 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
(07:27):
generations of French settlers that worked in the woods. So
you just mentioned right, yes, And she's very connected to nature.
So like we just learned all the birds 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
(07:47):
think of it as anything particularly special until I got
older and I realized that a lot of that stuff's
gone away.
Speaker 2 (07:55):
For a lot of people and also gave you ideas
for thirty years of songs, I think because there's so
much nature in your yeah, yeah writing, yeah, including and
we'll get to the new album as well. So when
did music enter your life when you were a kid?
Speaker 3 (08:12):
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 like Irish people, and so there's
definitely that thing in there for him too. But she
(08:35):
always had a voice that was just buttery and beautiful.
I remember, like some of my earliest memories are her
standing in a doorway where there are four bunk beds in.
My sisters and I were all in them, and she
was singing, and it was like magical.
Speaker 2 (08:51):
Would she sing you to sleep?
Speaker 3 (08:52):
Yeah? She sang, you know, hymns and like in French.
She that was her first language. So we heard those
old things that she got when she was a kid.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
And did you have music through the Catholic church as
well or.
Speaker 3 (09:06):
Is 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, I wouldn't be
singing if it weren't for hearing her voice.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
Did she ever teach you songs?
Speaker 3 (09:31):
Uh? Yeah, well we would make up songs together when
I was really little.
Speaker 2 (09:35):
Yeah, so when did you start? What was your first instrument?
Speaker 3 (09:40):
My first instrument was the flute because it was the
one the instrument that was available in the elementary school band.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Yeah, it was good old days where they would just
send students into a room and say, just pick up something.
Speaker 3 (09:54):
I think.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:55):
My sister had one. It's so accusing, that's what it was.
She actually wanted to play the flute, and she had
borrowed one or something from the 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.
Speaker 2 (10:17):
So when did the guitar start?
Speaker 3 (10:20):
When I was a teenager, I bought a Honer guitar
for like half of my savings account, which was probably
one hundred dollars and uh.
Speaker 2 (10:29):
Was it at a local music store mail order Yeah.
Speaker 3 (10:31):
It was a local music store 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 couldn't get. I wanted a saxophone. It was not
going to happen. They were none available, too expensive, and
(10:53):
so because I thought that had the kind of tones
that it would feel really good. So 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.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
You know, but you want to He wanted to have
an instrument, but.
Speaker 3 (11:10):
I needed an instrument to write songs too with it.
And so I practiced the guitar as much as I could,
you know, as one of those guitars where the strings
are about an inch off of the neck, you know.
Speaker 2 (11:22):
It really hurt your fingers, get really strong hands. Yeah,
we listening to radio at this point. Was there any
what music was coming in that sort of fed that
got it?
Speaker 3 (11:32):
The music was great all the way through growing up.
I 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, and I
was a really little you know, Smokey Robinson, and you know,
that was what I was really into. And I was
small and music with voices, with beautiful voices and interesting lyrics.
(11:56):
And then I sort of moved on to the Beatles,
and you know, after they broke up and Ricky Lee
Jones made her way into that mix. You know, at
some point when I was a teenager, and there's a
list of them, you know, it would take me a
long time to name them all.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
Now, did you think this would be a career for you?
Did you? Was there part of you that thought, no,
music's going to be my life.
Speaker 3 (12:20):
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,
you know, And I went after the singing. Because I
don't have a naturally powerful voice. I have to exercise it,
(12:43):
you know, train like an athlete with my voice to
get it to work.
Speaker 2 (12:47):
I always think of you as like sort of being
a powerhouse. I think particularly your first album.
Speaker 3 (12:53):
Yeah, that was just being in really good. It was
just tuned up, you know. I built it that way.
Speaker 2 (12:58):
So you had what people consider a late start. You
were in your thirties. I think, Yeah, your first album
came that is late start. How long had you been
singing before your first album came out.
Speaker 3 (13:09):
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, she's like my age. I got to see
her when she was twenty one years old in Boston
Common and it was like magic, you know, the voice
(13:30):
coming out of her. And there's just so many great
singers to study and learn different things from, and Aretha
Franklin and Edna James and you know, the great singers
like that. I studied a lot when I was younger
and Patsy Kline. 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
(13:54):
it flowed, the more I could do with it, the
better I felt in the world.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
When was the first time you went out on stage.
Speaker 3 (14:02):
The first time I was still in high school. I
think my guitar teacher. He was playing at a ramata
inn in Bangor, Maine, and I got up and I
did chuck, he's in love with him?
Speaker 2 (14:15):
Yeah, uh huh so okay, yeah? And then when did
you start doing it solo?
Speaker 3 (14:21):
Not until my later twenties. It was really hard for
me to do that, you know good. I went to
an open mic night and because I was just so
afraid of saying it.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
What was this in Boston?
Speaker 3 (14:35):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (14:35):
What did you tell yourself to be able to get
up there and do that?
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Well? I had a guitar teacher that another guitar teacher
that I would show up at, you know, a guitar lesson.
I'd play him a new song. You go, that's really great,
you should get gigs, and then I go. But I
really wanted him to come with me, and so I
finally wore him down and he did so he kind
of launched the duo with me with a duo, and
(15:00):
then I just started doing it on my own after
a while. John Curtis was his name.
Speaker 2 (15:06):
You must have been doing something right. You got scouted
fair soon after you were you started playing, yeah, and
signed a record deal.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
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're
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
(15:36):
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.
Speaker 2 (15:47):
You mean other people's songs.
Speaker 1 (15:48):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:49):
I always go back to Tears of a Clown. It's
like a miraculous song, which was co written with Stevie
Wonder actually and Smoke Your RUMs and 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?
(16:12):
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,
and then it just kind of started they started showing up.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
Now, well you I'm fascinated by this. Would you try
and break down that song? Like, what does the melody
do here? Wasn't anything formal like that?
Speaker 3 (16:41):
No, No, I do a little bit of that now.
I mean now I listened to Tears of the 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 and it just kind
of probably came out of them like that. You know,
they just probably now it goes here, and now it
(17:02):
goes here, and now the words say this, and you know,
it's just I would love to know how that was
when they wrote that song.
Speaker 1 (17:11):
We'll be back with more from Patty Griffin after the break.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
Now, thinking about your first album, your first song is
on that album as Moses, And immediately when people hear that,
you start on a suspended chord? Did you study theory?
Did you know that? But it's got a it's got
a very particular I mean, it showcases your voice, but
you're not starting on a chord tone.
Speaker 3 (17:38):
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. Great. Buddy Miller said, Patty,
I love watching you play guitar because everything you do
is so wrong and it gives me all kinds of
great idea. And I'm like, Okay, that's that's that's a compliment.
(18:03):
I think it's a high compliment. Actually, okay, I.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
Think I think you know a little more than you're
letting on.
Speaker 3 (18:08):
I think 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 you know what
I mean. I just but as far as the theory goes,
I'm just always like hunt and peck on that stuff.
Speaker 2 (18:22):
But you're often finding those those tones, those notes that
aren't in the chord, that like really color the chord.
And it's literally the first note you sang on that
on that record. It's just so powerful. I didn't know
that you didn't.
Speaker 3 (18:38):
No, I think it's neat 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 apparently I did. So I love to dig around.
(19:00):
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 stick to one
little line and you know you're over here and you
stay there on the fourth, you know 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
(19:23):
how one would even go about learning that.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
Okay, what was it like for you? And I'm going
to jump ahead, because you sang with Emilu Harris, you
sing Trapez what was because she is the gold standard
for duet singing. What was that like?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Well, I know by then I'd known Emmy for a
really long time and we'd already sung on a bunch
of the others things, So it was just like having
my buddy come to the studio.
Speaker 2 (19:51):
And sing so as natural.
Speaker 3 (19:54):
Yeah, you just like, you know, 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. I think she's feeling her way through it.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
You just let her.
Speaker 3 (20:14):
Yeah, okay, stay out of her way.
Speaker 2 (20:16):
That first album, you did a whole produced album, and
I think with Nile Rogers, the producer.
Speaker 3 (20:22):
No. Well, I did a project with Nile Rogers here
in the nineties which went absolutely nowhere. He had a
record label for like two minutes called ear Candy. He
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
(20:45):
technical caliber, and I didn't 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 Burn, who is you know from that whole
New Orleans Danny Lenwill Mark Howard Camp and that was,
you know, trial by fire. That was really like I
(21:08):
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. They
didn't like any of the things that he did. And
that wasn't really crazy about it either, because I had
been so tired and confused making the record the whole time.
(21:30):
They just didn't hear me on it.
Speaker 1 (21:33):
You know.
Speaker 3 (21:33):
David Anderley was the head of A and R at
A and M Records, and I got called out to
California quite a few times in those early days. Here's
how this, 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 final, just put it out and then nobody's
(21:54):
going to care about it, and then we'll just drop
her and then we'll be on our way. But 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 favor when he rejected that record, because
it made me go out as vulnerable as it possibly could.
(22:15):
You know, it 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
(22:36):
they play him on the radio on small radio. Why
can't you just So 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.
(23:00):
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.
Speaker 2 (23:09):
But it must have been terrifying at the time.
Speaker 3 (23:13):
It was weird. Yeah, it was weird to be And now,
you know, I know musician friends who listen to the
first record and I go, oh, I totally get what
you should have done with that. Where were you back then?
Speaker 2 (23:24):
You know you should have done with it. I mean
that's an incredible first record. Though the songs on it are.
Speaker 3 (23:30):
They were definitely meant to be produced. They're written to
be arranged, but I didn't know how to do that
at the time.
Speaker 2 (23:37):
Did you want to learn how to arrange after that?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
I did, and I and I do, and I think
I have really good ideas, but I think there are
when it comes to my own stuff, I need someone
from the outside to come and help me, because you know,
I can't hold that perspective you know that you need.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
And there are I mean, there are great songs on it.
There's let Them Fly, which a lot of people have covered.
Time Will Do the Talking, which I love, 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 it's an amazing song.
(24:16):
Tell me about those songs.
Speaker 3 (24:18):
Poor Man's House. That one was written. I was living
in Jamaica Plane in Boston, and that was just about
about a mile away from where my grandparents. My Irish
grandparents were servants on an estate. I think they worked
for the Roebucks, like the series of Robuts family and yeah,
(24:39):
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. I 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
(25:01):
and get your family to survives that you have, there
are people whose entire lives are that bare minimum. 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 managed to do it.
(25:22):
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, and 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.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Oh, you thought you were just doing fluff.
Speaker 3 (25:42):
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,
(26:02):
and you know what I mean, and you are your
job is to be the person that serves them, you know.
I realized that 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. It was
(26:23):
a 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.
Speaker 2 (26:41):
So when you say you had trouble getting up on stage,
was some of that feeling.
Speaker 3 (26:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (26:46):
I would inform that.
Speaker 3 (26:47):
Yeah, you should, you should. Your job is to go
and hand people things and that they need. And then
by 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
(27:09):
because people don't recognize it as a really wonderful thing
to do and know how to do well.
Speaker 2 (27:15):
I'll bet you you're a good tipper to this day.
Speaker 3 (27:17):
I am.
Speaker 2 (27:17):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (27:18):
Yeah, you got to really really mess up for me
to get you down to twenty percent.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
And then tell me about sweet Lorraine.
Speaker 3 (27:28):
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. The day before. She had her father,
who was this woodsman. He came in from the woods
every so often and kind of turned everybody's world upside
down and then went back to the woods, very heavy
(27:51):
drinker and a wild kind of guy. And she met
my dad and then started seeing my dad and then
very quickly got married. And he made some comment to
her at their sort of rehearsal dinner, I guess that
she must be pregnant, and then he went into calling
her some really bad names and they should never say
(28:14):
to your daughter. And the day of the wedding, my
dad tried to get out of it because he was
terrified getting married. So she's like, I mean, it's funny
now because I wasn't there. It wasn't me. But like,
she's gone through, she's made her wedding dress, she's gone
through all of this stuff. Should do this thing that
(28:36):
she wasn't even sure she wanted to do because she
was really doing all right on her own. And then
the next thing, you know, this guy who says really
horrible things to her is the guy that gives her
away to this guy who wants to get out of it,
you know. So it's like she just went there's no
way we're not doing this now because she just had it.
(28:57):
You know, with men, we're definitely getting married. You're gonna
marry me, and that's too bad, you know. So you
know my mom now looking back now, especially because I
know her in a different way, I know her as
a force of nature. Now, that was quite something for
a force of nature to be given away by a
drunk guy to somebody who was too scared to even
(29:18):
do what he'd asked her to do in the first place.
And she'd gone all to this great trouble of bringing herself.
Speaker 2 (29:25):
To Was she telling you this because in some way
she admired you for being forgetting a divorce.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
No, she didn't. She was. She's Catholic. My parents were
Catholic and they really she was against the divorce. I
was not Catholic at this point, so I didn't have
any problem getting divorced. But she really thought you stay
in your marriage.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
So the next few albums you did Flaming Red, A
Thousand Kisses, Impossible Dream, you know, those albums to me,
captured that alternative country sound. Did you hear in so
many you know? You hear in the Robert Plant that
kind of t bone Burnett, you know, the kind of
(30:09):
softer percussion, a lot of feedback. Those are the records
to me that really solidified that sound. That's rights where
that sound? Is that something you wanted? Is that? How
involved were you with that production?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
I was very involved with all of those productions. Jay
Joyce did Flaming Red, then I did A Thousand Kisses
with Doug Lancio and that by a Thousand Kisses, I
was off record labels, so I was I had to
make something on the cheap, which is why we shrunk
everything down to the bare minimum. We got an ensemble,
(30:47):
you know, and did a classic kind of ensemble kind
of record like they would have done in the fifties,
you know what I mean, our forties. We're just everybody's
you know, we have a xylophone, you know what I mean.
And we're going to use this through the whole record
because we had a very very tight budget. I haven't
ever set out to do anything that I've done. I
(31:09):
do set out to try to do things. I never
feel like I'm my authentic me, you know.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Really it's got to come to you.
Speaker 3 (31:16):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2 (31:17):
Was it a lot of live playing in the studio? Yeah,
and then were you was doing the singing on top
later or No.
Speaker 3 (31:25):
We did a lot of stuff, especially A thousand kisses.
We did everything, guitar voice, you know. I did it
in like a couple of days. You know, it's it's
not a big long record, and I had lots of
time to get ready for it because I wasn't on
a label anymore. So it was just I just had
myself together because I knew we need to not spend
(31:48):
a lot of money. I went in there and just
kind of put the basics down and then Doug painted
over that. But Jay Joyce, that was a whole other
can of worms. The way he works, but it also
very quickly recorded.
Speaker 2 (32:02):
You had been playing for so long solo or maybe
with one other guitarist to sing with a band, as
you started with on Flaming Red, what was that like?
Speaker 3 (32:12):
I honestly felt like I was more powerful by myself,
Like you have to sing differently with the band because
they're doing the passion, so you have to step back.
To me, my mind always went, oh, that vocal now
has to step back a little bit, and they take
the emotional thing and they play it. So if we're
(32:36):
all doing that, it's going to be it'lbeit shit show,
you know. So I always felt like I had more
less control over how it was going to go on
stage until very recently. Yeah, I've been working with and
that's that's not anything on the bands that I worked
with had. I worked with this great guitar player, Doug Lancey,
(32:58):
who was my band leader for years, and he would
just chase me around like if I wasn't in tune,
he'd get out of tune and find, you know, and
just follow me everywhere. But I still didn't really get
into learning how to be play with people until the
last probably ten or fifteen years with David Polkingham. He's
really been the guy that has been just patiently helped
(33:21):
me figure out how to ask for what I want
and try to achieve it.
Speaker 2 (33:25):
You know, that's interesting. So when you some of those songs,
if you went out by yourself, it was almost a
relief to sing them. Yeah, when you're doing solo yeah.
Speaker 3 (33:34):
And now it's the other way around.
Speaker 2 (33:36):
I really want to want to hide behind those guys.
Speaker 1 (33:42):
After this last break, we'll be back with Patty Griffin.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
You know what I mentioned at people I was talking
to you, everybody said, please ask her about, Please ask
her about. So I do have some greatest hits. I
have to ask you about long Ride Home. I always
thought that was from a man's point of view. It is,
it is. You're very good at singing from a man's
point of view.
Speaker 3 (34:07):
I know something wrong with me.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
No, No, like like your cover of the Springsteen song
Stolen Cars is perfect.
Speaker 3 (34:18):
Well there, you know, And there's a whole world of
gender fluid out there which has a whole other take
on that too, I'm sure, but I never felt like
there should be it should be limited to your gender
as as far as characters go. You know, you don't
ask writers you're writing fiction, to only write if they're man,
(34:42):
only write about man at the women to write you
know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (34:44):
Oh recently, yes, they have asked that, but general.
Speaker 3 (34:47):
Yeah, maybe that's a good idea.
Speaker 2 (34:49):
Actually, was that was any of that taken from an experience?
Or that was that was just a story you imagined.
Speaker 3 (34:58):
I bought a guitar from Groom's Guitar store in Nashville.
It was still my main guitar. It's Gibson nineteen sixty
five J fifty and I just bought it, went sat
down at a kitchen table in Nashville and wrote that song.
It just kind of came out of the guitar. And
(35:19):
it's definitely based on you know, people that some people
I know, and what was happening in my life at
the time.
Speaker 2 (35:25):
Are you the kind that works every day, like you
sit down every day with no, no.
Speaker 3 (35:29):
No, Not anymore. I used to. I used to be
like kind of obsessive about that, and I needed a
break from that. And I haven't really resumed the work level.
I'm not sure I will. I mean, I'm older now too,
and there's a lot I want to do.
Speaker 2 (35:47):
In the world besides songwriting.
Speaker 3 (35:49):
Beside songwriting and it's very you know, it does take
up a lot of space when you do it. I
really enjoyed writing these last songs for this record because
I took a lot of songs that are on this
record or things that I had written and chucked out
and I just thought, oh, that's terrible, it's terrible, and
(36:10):
checked another one out. And then I kind of went
through the voice memos at a certain point and went,
that's not why to throw that out, Like I'd want
to hear how this turns out, you know what I mean?
So so I didn't. When I finished writing this record,
it was really just sort of almost like facing myself.
Everybody gets stuck in things, and sometimes you know you're
stuck in something and you're willing to stay stuck.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
Damn it. You know, we're definitely was it in your
writing you felt stuck?
Speaker 3 (36:38):
Yeah. I didn't want to write cleverly. I wanted things
to be really basic and straight from my gut.
Speaker 2 (36:48):
You're writing reminds me a lot of Leonard Cohen's right, Wow,
have you heard that?
Speaker 1 (36:53):
No?
Speaker 3 (36:53):
Thank you? Okay, and you're a Canadian, so thank you.
That's really absolutely I'm an honor.
Speaker 2 (36:58):
Yeah, that's like saying you Wow, stick handle, like Wayne
Gretzky's can I Ask You about? A couple more songs
to get to the new album Okay, Useless Desires, which
I think is just a fabulous song.
Speaker 3 (37:13):
That was me experimenting with. I was working a lot
in Nashville. I was hearing all kinds of music that
I'd never heard before, and I was working with Emilu
Harris and she's amazing, but I didn't grow up listening
to Emulu, So I was like she. I was getting
exposed to this kind of music that I'd never really
listened to before and enjoying it. And I was actually
(37:37):
just trying to find a spot in my voice to
see what would feel like to sing, And that's the
song that kind of rolled out on me. It was
really more about a feeling I wanted to have in
my voice.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
When you're writing, the melodies come first before the chords before.
Speaker 3 (37:53):
The most of the time, I would say most of
the time, but not all the time.
Speaker 2 (37:58):
We should mention you did Band of Joy, which was
step which is stepping back a little bit and being
part of an ensemble. What was was that a good experience?
What was that like?
Speaker 3 (38:07):
It was really good. I really he just wanted to
not have pressure on me of running the show and
just be part of the band, and I think that's
really where my personality is best suited as being on
a team. I met a movie director once and I said,
can I come and hang out and watch the guts
(38:28):
of a film? I just want to see what was
like back and he let me do that. I love
behind the scenes. I like being part of something that
supports I'm a better service person, more naturally suited to
it personality wise, I think. But at the same time,
I have my own stories that I want to tell.
So I didn't know where to go next musically, and
I really knew I wanted to make a change, and
(38:50):
I didn't know how to get there. And band a
joy without realizing it. Looking back, I think it was
me kind of just trying to shake myself up a
little bit and start moving into other directions, looking for
other things to do. And it was really really fun
and the band was amazing.
Speaker 2 (39:09):
So I do want to talk about the new album,
which a lot is about your mother, as you've written,
and when I was listening to it, I kept thinking
about I think my favorite song of yours, which is Mary,
thank you, and I'm going to start up? Can you
actually finish the chorus for me? I couldn't stay another day.
Speaker 3 (39:28):
I couldn't stay another day longer. He flies right by
and leaves a kiss upon her face while the angels
were I can't see that crazy seeing his praises in
a blaze of glory. Mary stayed behind and started cleaning up,
cleaning up the place. Yeah, that's definitely a theme.
Speaker 2 (39:48):
But that is so I remember hearing that song for
the first time just being so.
Speaker 3 (39:52):
Like, who's gonna, you know, who's sticking around to really
put life back together?
Speaker 2 (39:58):
Yeah? No, And when I when I mentioned Leonard Cohen,
that's had he ever actually cleaned up, he might have
written yeah, but it is. It is such a great,
beautiful sort of encapsulation of that that role.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Yeah, that's a tricky spot for women too. That since
I've written it, I've thought about this a few times,
like if you put women like in this quiet kind
of stoic you know, we're just going to clean up
after you kind of stuff, you know. And I guess
when I wrote it, it was sort of like why why,
(40:35):
over and over again? Is this the pattern? I question it.
I think it just because things have always been the
way they've always been doesn't mean they have to stay
their destructive way, you.
Speaker 2 (40:49):
Know, right. But you look back on your mother in
this record, in All the Way Home, which has a
line not the Life my Mother chose, Well.
Speaker 3 (40:58):
That song is not about my mom?
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Oh was that not?
Speaker 3 (41:01):
No? No, no, that's like made up story, that's it?
Speaker 2 (41:04):
Was that, right?
Speaker 1 (41:05):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (41:05):
I just assumed it was about your mother. Yeah. I
do want to ask you. I think they're all beautiful songs.
Back at the start at the end, she said, sort
of slightly apocalyptic. Born in a Cage is a beautiful song.
And you were talking about birds in your youth.
Speaker 3 (41:23):
That grew the lyrics grew out of talking to my mom.
My mom noticed that she grew up in Maine, and
I remember there were like, you know, a bird feeder
would be out in the wintertime and there would just
be hundreds of little beautiful birds. And they have really
kind of their populations have really really diminished. She's just
(41:44):
not seeing some of the birds that she was used
to seeing twenty years before were just not coming back around.
And the Earth's taking a beating from us, and I
kind of put that in my mind with yet another
one of those moments that women are aware of and
(42:06):
kind of just accepting on a regular basis, But we
probably need to not be accepting it that the amount
of women disappearing on a regular basis daily in the world,
just disappearing, it's really similar. It's connected to the birds disappearing.
It's the same disease to me.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
So the last song on the album A word. How
about the last line on the album, which is but
I Will never stop loving you, which is a is
a surprise in the song because it doesn't start as
a love song. So who's that about everybody?
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Life? It really isn't about anybody in particular. It's really
about why I'm here. Just really done a lot of
thinking about why I'm here on earth, you know, in
the last few years, spending time with my mom. You know,
it's real honored to be with somebody when they're dying,
because they you end up kind of thinking about your
(43:05):
own stuff. And I just want to not be an asshole.
I want to support love. And sometimes I can go
through a day and really see how beautiful just about
everybody is and everything is. You know, some days sometimes
I can't do that at all. But that's my goal,
is to understand how precious it is and connected we
(43:29):
all are and everything is. And I know it sounds
awful woo woo, I'm sure, but it's really is actually
this thing that I try to.
Speaker 2 (43:38):
Do that seems like a perfect place to start. Okay,
that was wonderful. Thank you so much, Thank you very much.
That was really wonderful.
Speaker 3 (43:44):
Nice to talk to you.
Speaker 1 (43:48):
And the episode description you'll find a link to Patti
Griffin's new album, Crown of Roses, as well as the
collection of songs over the course of her career. Be
sure to check out YouTube dot com slash Broken Record
Podcast to see all of our video interviews, and be
sure to follow us on Instagram at the Broken Record Pod.
You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken
Record is produced and edited by Leah Rose, with marketing
(44:09):
help from Eric Sandler and Jordan McMillan. Our engineer is
Ben Holliday. Broken Record is production of Pushkin Industries. If
you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing
to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that
offers bonus content and ad free listening for four ninety
nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions,
(44:29):
and if you like this show, please remember to share, rate,
and review us on your podcast app. Our theme music's
by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.
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