Servant of Love shows how the singer-songwriter keeps evolving, unafraid of what the future holds.
Never let it be said that singer-songwriter Patty Griffin is afraid of change. As one of the Americana scene’s unquestioned champions, the supremely talented Austinite seems rather talented at altering her course effectively. Griffin grew up in Maine, where she began her life as a musician playing guitar at age 16. By 1992, she was hitting the busy coffeehouse circuit in the Boston area. From there, however, Griffin followed her fearless muse to Austin, Texas, in 1997. The relocation wasn’t merely geographical.
“One of the reasons I moved to Austin from Maine back then was because I wanted a change,” explains Griffin, who won the Best Traditional Gospel Album Grammy Award in 2011 for her stunning Downtown Church. “It was a good move, but it was hard to leave my people.”
Though Griffin’s music is all too often simply categorized as folk, her impressive catalog is rather varied, ranging from folk-rock to acoustic roots to gospel and even Southern Gothic sounds. And yet, as sonically diverse as her releases have been, Griffin’s excellent new album, Servant of Love, still marks a change from the work of her past.
Stark piano, Miles Davis-style jazz arrangements, and some cinematically ominous tones lend this album a more adventurous overall feel than before. Griffin knows it’s a departure from her past efforts, and she confronted the room-hogging elephant head-on with the album’s opening number, the dramatic, powerful title track.
“I like that song being there,” she explains. “I think it’s a good entry point for the record, personally. Sonically, it sets up the rest of the record really well. I’m not trying to freak anyone out, or throw anyone off with putting a different type of song up front. I don’t think that way when I’m making a record, I just think about what will work best for the album.”
“Everything’s Changed,” a hypnotic, atmospheric song, works especially well for the album, and it epitomizes the current of change running through her career.
“It’s a dark song,” Griffin says. “It’s about those moments in everyone’s life when, all of a sudden, things will never be the same from that point on for one reason or another. One minute, you’re staring at the sunrise, smoking a cigarette, and a few minutes later, you get a phone call with life-altering, or devastating news. I also thought about the people in Austin who came here during Hurricane Katrina that haven’t ever had the chance to go back home to New Orleans. Those people had a moment 10 years ago when they had a moment to decide that they were leaving. So much of their lives has been gone ever since that day.”
With her debut album now 19 years old, Griffin has seen the personal meanings in some of the songs from early in her career shift, representing something to her now that they didn’t when she wrote them.
“Sometimes, songs develop deeper emotional layers over the years,” she says. “And sometimes, you grow up and songs mean something different because you just grow out of them, because as you get older, hopefully you become less self-centered.”
Patty Griffin is touring the United States supporting Servant of Love. See her website for tour dates or to order the album.
