Patty Griffin – Patty Griffin
PGM (distributed via Thirty Tigers) – 8 March 2019
Patty Griffin’s tenth album is her first in four years and the first to carry an eponymous title. It is very much a personal statement, one informed by both her successful battle with breast cancer and the cancerous state of the nation. It’s also some of the bluesiest work she’s recorded, the songs often more inclined to mood and feel than hummable melodies.
All but two tracks featuring David Pulkingham on guitar, it opens with their co-write, Mama’s Worried, her jazz-inflected vocals accompanied only by just his Spanish acoustic on a song from the perspective of a child observing the struggles of her mother to keep the household together and maintain her dignity after her husband walked out, singing (the blues, you assume) to keep her spirits up while others “look at us and turn up their nose.” You could hear Billie Holiday singing this.
Introducing cello, piano and lap steel, River is a country coloured slow strum about female resilience, independence and self-determination as she sings “Isn’t she a river?….You can’t really have her/But you can hold her for a time” and how it “Takes an army just to bend her”, extending the metaphor in the final, vocally soaring verse for “She’s been left for dead a million times/Keeps coming home/Arms open wide/Ever changing and undefined.”
The tempo shifts up a gear with the train wheels rolling rhythm of Where I Come From, the first to feature drums, a statement of heritage and place and the siren call of home no matter how far you go to escape it or who you are, the lyric moving from widescreen to close focus as she details how “The veterans of all the past wars/Sit outside on a Sunday afternoon” and how “The mills closed down long ago and so/We’re way past unemployment.” But, while the town may have become a bad joke, this again is a song of survival and pride as, in the September sun, as the light is dying, it is “Most beautiful/As the day goes down.”
Eddie Lehwald brings trombone to the party to give a New Orleans sauntering swing to Hourglass, Griffin in Bessie Smith mode for another number that takes the morning after the night before to spin hard-won wisdom about meeting life’s body blows without buckling, with “a turned up collar and some very strong hips/A strong will for when the money slips”, but also about not running scared, because “Shouldn’t a person at least try to be free/Instead of giving up and just pretending to be?”
Okay, so the notion that love and dreamers can heal the divisions that have split America is a little Disneyesque, but it’s surely better to hope we can reach out rather than push away.
A solo spotlight for Griffin, the folksy poignant and plaintive Had A Good Reason is a simple acoustic strummed story-song about abandonment (“I guess you’re never gonna come back for me Ma/With a suitcase of pretty dresses and shoes”) that moves from self-blame (“I used to think it might be who I am/Maybe who I am wasn’t right”) to understanding and compassion (“I know you must have had a good reason”) and the emotional Hollywood ending of the narrator, now a star with crowds queuing round the block, imaging her mother out in the audience, singing along, and becoming “a bird with no ceiling/A voice and a feeling like ’ll never come down.”
On the wailingly sung Bluebeard, marimba and cello complementing the circular chord progression, Griffin takes on the murder ballad tradition, drawing on the French folktale for a folk-blues recounting of the tale of a woman who, ignoring her mother and sister’s warning, discovers she’s married to a serial wife murderer but, in the chanted refrain “Maiden no more” proves an elemental force of nature as “The forces of the sea and sand/The light and the life of the land/All rose up with a hundred hands…and killed that man.” Make of the metaphor what you will.
Another simple repeated bluesy strummed riff, backed by Celtic infused drones and percussion, What Now is one of two tracks to feature Robert Plant, howling “Where to? What next? What now?” in the background as Griffin goes down to the sea to contemplate direction having lost her emotional compass.
Things are musically calmer for the cello-caressed, piano-led Luminous Places, which, Pulkingham again on Spanish guitar, draws on images of the travelling musician (“Crisscrossing the land like a stitch on a wound’) for another affirmation that life, like the moon, comes in phases and “what is lost will be what is won.”
The second to feature Plant’s backing vocals, accompanied just by twin guitars the deeply felt Coins (the only lyric to mention cancer) enters the realm of gender politics and #MeToo, referencing her early waitressing days to sketch a toxic relationship in terms of entitled men who use their wealth to dominate women, “a fiefdom for your fragile pride.”
Returning to Celtic folk influences, the equally sparsely arranged Boys From Tralee with its resonator guitar turns to the history of Irish immigration (here to Canada), seeking to escape famine and poverty, where those who didn’t die of hunger and sickness on the voyage, thrown overboard before breathing their last, “Would live a short and lonely life in a foreign land.”
Anchored by the bassline, a more specific lens is applied to the six-minute blues and gospel handclap rhythm of The Wheel (that circular motion imagery again) on which she draws a comparison between the incessant nature of the rain and the struggle with depression and racism, the song specifically referencing Eric Garner, an African-American on Staten Island who, in 2014, died from a police chokehold when he was arrested on suspicion of selling single cigarettes.
It’s back to just Griffin and Pulkingham for What I Remember, which, more Piaf than Holiday, slowly reveals itself as a song about a sexual assault survivor (“The place was a little derelict/You added poison to the wine”) before the album ends with just Griffin accompanying herself on piano for Just The Same, a reflective, almost hymnal song of acceptance, survival and inevitability (‘I can’t decide which scares me more/The iron will or the lonely call/Or the feeling that we’ve been here before”) and a life “Made of stardust and loneliness.”
An album of quiet grace, determination, survival and self-identity, this serves as a reminder of her status among the Americana greats. Griffin has been through some hard times, but, as the song says “you can’t hold her back for long/A river is just too strong/And she’s a river.” Long may she flow.