Patty Griffin - songs of survival

Sunday Magazine March 2020

There's a guy putting his hand on a singer's knee, and Patty Griffin has his number.

You don't know what you want

At this moment you think it's me.

Did you ever take the time to

Think about who I might be

She writes songs of quiet defiance and deep perception. Her words will take you wholly into the minds of other people: a hard-working father, a wide-eyed little girl with new shoes, the guy with roaming hands in One More Girl. Who is she to him? Not very much.

One more girl on the road

You might pass on your way home

Someone's sister, someone's wife or

Just some bitch who's probably

Got no life and yes I'm

One more girl on the stage

Just one more ass that got stuffed in some jeans

On the line from her home in Austin, Patty Griffin – freshly awarded a second Grammy, and many honours preceding it for her astonishingly moving songwriting and singing – is talking about being a woman in the music business. Griffin turns 56 tomorrow and has been in the industry a long time. Are things improving, or does a fresh generation just find itself dealing with a new wave of sexism?

She calls it tricky. "We have to keep on it. We can't let anybody tell us we're done. A lot of young women today are very, very powerful. I think you've got one," she says, meaning the Prime Minister on the cover of Time, "she is so powerful and independent – just lovely. And there's a lot out there that is empowering. But we have a way to go."

She recalls arriving on the music scene, excited that "now I don't have to have a job and I can make records" and somewhat assuming she was empowered by the generation before her and wouldn't have to worry. "But many years down the pike now, I look back and I see how affected I was by the double standard that was there. My awareness wasn't even there of things that weren't healthy and good for me as a woman. And it took a lot of years of experience and I think that that's still out there. Girls, women, are still facing the same things."

Sustaining an awareness is the question.

"We have a lot of work to do making sure that our daughters and our granddaughters and great-granddaughters really have an understanding that they can choose for themselves, decide for themselves, have the same value as anybody, any woman. That isn't necessarily what I see happening among all the young women that I see."

Did writing a song like One More Girl crystallise her understanding of what was going on? Can writing do that for her?

"Rarely," she says and pauses. "No." Another beat. "Not ever." And she laughs. Her conversation is punctuated with a laugh that suggests both delight and reserve. "No, hopefully not. I don't like crystallising anything. And I think it's good to keep moving – especially in songs. It's great when something can keep growing on you as a song, you know then you got something. You keep learning from it as you go. Or you don't sing it at all any more."

She's a remarkable observer. Her songs describe the New England of her childhood, the America she went out and discovered after working tables in Boston and wondering what it would be like to see the world. She grew up singing, but only in her 20s considered making it her life, began playing coffeehouses, scored a record deal, became one of the most admired singer songwriters in folk and Americana.

Just what can a song do for people? She can take some of life's hardest moments and somehow give it beauty and purity, with no false hope, no confected sentiment, just the feeling that there's optimism, somewhere, and warmth.

She's playing tonight (March 15) and tomorrow in Auckland where, the night of the Christchurch atrocity, another Americana hero – Alejandro Escovedo – played and was able to do something remarkable in a room of people shocked, numbed by the horror of the day. After a few songs and making a warm connection he came and played in the round, in the midst of everyone, talking and singing – and here it was, and there couldn't have been a better place to be: there's nothing so powerful as music for expressing what you cannot say.

Is that what she's doing, taking what's hurting inside, giving voice to what cannot be said? Does it feel like that for her?

"That's the ideal. But it's just, it's so… I think music is so natural, you know? It's just such a part of the nature of us all. I'm just lucky that I've gotten to do so much of it for so many people. I think it's a pretty natural part of how we function and survive. It connects us like nothing else can. You can't use speech in that way. You can use images, I think, that way. Music and images I think have that kind of power that it doesn't require thought – it just goes straight through. It's old. It's really old. Music is old, old, old. And it predates all the different forms of languages that we come up with as humans. So it's pretty cool."

We talk about storytelling, stories collected pouring drinks in bars. Is it a good way to see into lives? She has her reservations. "You see some shocking things when you're serving people food and drink. You see some shocking things about human beings that if you're raised by people who have taught you to behave and to be respectful, then you are amazed at what is out there – you know, it's like: Wow. These people out here really are bad. They're not doing well here."

She grew up with just everybody singing all the time doing work around the house.

It sounds lovely. Actually, she says, for the largest part it was how her mother, away from her French/Canadian family roots, coped.

"My mom comes from a singing family, like it just was built into everybody's life. My grandmother's family, they were all singers in the way that people used to be singers. They would just always find a reason to sing a song together. And so she came from that background. And then there's sort of this cultural shift where she ended up much more isolated from the community that way. She gave up her French when she was a kid, so she will be the last of hundreds of thousands of years maybe of that region of speech, the last one of my family. None of us have the French… it's kind of sad.

"And she was raising seven children, which she had come out of her body within seven years' time, you know. So she was just slammed. She was really, really busy and I think it kept her head above water to sing. It really did. That was the feeling. That it kept her sane.

"She always sang. And also she can never remember lyrics. So she would make them up. We would have these melodies and she would just make it up as she went along. It didn't matter. She just wanted to sing the melody and she had to come up with some words so she would just plug in whatever came out. Which is pretty cool, looking back."

In Burgundy Shoes the sun is coming out after a long, cold New England winter.

We wait for the bus that's going to Bangor

In my plaid dress and burgundy shoes

In your red lipstick and lilac kerchief

You're the most pretty lady in the world

The bus driver smiles, a dime and a nickel

We climb on our seats, the vinyl is cold

"Michelle ma belle", the song that you loved then

You hold my hand and sing to yourself

"Yeah I think she was really in love with that song because it had French in it – I remember that one being something they sang when I was really, really small."

Her mother is still alive, 88, still in Maine. "So I do get back there quite a bit. Not enough, but quite a bit.

"It's getting more populated and it's changing in the way things are changing everywhere. But I do feel like the people, the working people, of Maine have really been left behind, pretty much like everywhere else. In my mind the election of Ronald Reagan marks the start of this way of thinking and it hasn't really ever gone back to pride and power for the people that work and, you know, get the food on the table."

Singing in eulogy to her father, there's a catch in her voice that pulls at your heart as she sings

You don't ever have to pay the bills no more

Break a sweat or walk a worried floor now

Working like a dog ain't what you're for now

You don't ever have to pay the bills no more

"He was an Irishman. He came from Irish immigrants and so it was really not in his DNA to let me ever forget about, you know, the underbelly of the society and the poor people. He was a teacher. He was a guy who got educated on the GI bill when he got back from World War II – it was free for the GIs who fought in the war – so he managed to sort of become somewhat professional in his career. But he really was kind of a displaced working guy, I think, at heart."

She's been moving for a long time, lately she's been contemplating doing less of that. Since 2016 she has faced breast cancer, radiation, losing her voice, surviving, recovering, and making an album that distils powerful experiences of mortality and grief. She's had some restoration of equilibrium to her own life, though she worries about the state of things around her.

"I'm always thinking where can I go next and we can't really sustain any of these things that we've been doing. The land runs out, the resources run out, so how do we live with what we have?"

Our conversation had begun with a light chat about coronavirus and the state of world politics and the climate crisis. The centre may not be holding. "I think anyone who has ever had cancer will tell you that it sort of always feels like it may be lurking around the corner. So I mean there is definitely the sort of awareness of what is coming, for all of us, you know. That's probably much more than ever before for me but I feel like I'm scrambling, almost, to figure out what I can do to – as our former president said – just point the ship just a little bit in another direction."

We're in this really strange little period of time on Earth, these last few hundred years, she says, so many of us descended from people who moved out from Europe across the planet. "We're from people who move on, and we adventure on, and that's really taking its toll on the Earth to sort of see the Earth that way. I mean I'm in Texas which is getting hotter and hotter and hotter every year, and I'm wondering: I don't know if I can retire here. But on the other hand, I think the right thing to do is at least try to stay and give back to this community I've taken a lot from over the years, you know. There've been centuries and centuries of people who've lived in the same places, especially indigenous people. So, like, how do we get some of that in our lives?"

We had also talked, in fretting about the state of the world, about the Stoic philosophy of doing just what you can with what's in front of you, and not letting the rest of it trouble you. She likes that. "I was reading this really cool book about the brain by this guy named Iain McGilchrist, this British neuroscientist. He said our brain is really much more of a transmitter than the receptor than we think of it being. We don't really think about it. We think of our thoughts as originating from us but, you know, just to get on the phone and hear you immediately start in about something that has already been on my mind in the last month…"

Why not get a little metaphysical, seeing we're contemplating doom? We talk about notions of death and mortality, that perhaps it helps to see everything as a lava lamp of atoms that just keeps moving around and reassembling – we're never really gone, we're all part of something larger. She laughs, says that sounds kind of cool. I wonder if it fits with the idea of brains transmitting and receiving and a shared sensibility and if all of that hangs together, can we all be making our own little pulse to do what we can, write something, sing something, do something?

"It kind of makes you wonder. Especially right now, it seems like the globe is infected with leadership that's pretty crappy. Our understanding of power sort of has to shift. That to me is not even powerful. It's really based on being afraid. And I never really did really think too much about it, well, you know, while Barack Obama was my president. It really didn't seem like he was trying to take everything away from you.

"So I don't know. It's interesting. It makes me wonder about the power of what we can do by just doing what's right in front of us as best we can in the least harmful way for the greater population."

You can find her, on YouTube, singing all over the world. On stage with Emmylou Harris and Nanci Griffith and Steve Earle, on her stool holding her guitar, she tells the audience being on stage with these other marvellous people is the most fun you can have and the most terrifying it can be.

"Well I think that I'm always a little terrified on stage no matter where I am, with somebody or not, and I've been really lucky over the years to get to sit in the same room and listen to the music of – right next to me – some people who really know how to get to the soul with music. And I mean it's a pretty rare thing to get to do in life, you know, and I'm very lucky, that's how I feel about it now."

Robert Plant, 70s stadium rock god, for some years her life partner, first sang in the same room with her when he was making his album Band of Joy. They needed another voice, someone suggested Patty Griffin. He loved her work, but wondered if her voice would be too big. He was amazed at how she dropped into track with them so sublimely well.

"I loved doing backup singing. For quite a few years, I studied it and worked really, really hard at trying to learn how to do it well. Prior to being sick I was doing quite a lot of it, and haven't really picked that back up again."

She laughs: "But I loved getting to be in a band, just doing back up singing because all the pressure was on him! And I could just make music, you know, I didn't have to make sure the audience was taken care of. And he had to do that – and also he's really really good at it, he's quite good on stage. So it was fun to just be near somebody who was great at that, you know."

She loves Twenty Feet From Stardom, the documentary about backup singers living in a world just beyond the spotlight, singing for the world's biggest bands. "I really wanted to do that project. I was talking about doing that documentary for a long time and I'm so glad somebody did it. I have no idea how to make a film. But you just have to watch, like, Tina Turner's backup singers in the 60s and go: Who are you?? Who is that? You are fantastic. You are just an incredible human being.

"And you want to know who they are. And I think what's really fun about their job is that they don't have to tell you who they are. I mean they are just sort of there, being an instrument in the band.

"I think one of the things about singing, and the way it's done right now, is it's not on the back porch any more. It's much more something that people go out and do to make a living. But it used to be, and that's fairly recent. And so as a singer, you know, to just go in and sing the notes, and sort of support a piece of music, and not be a feature of it, I find that really attractive because there's something a little more satisfying about it. I can't say it's more satisfying. I love getting to talk to an audience and find out about them and things like that, but it's a whole different take on it and it's kind of a more old school, I think, family kind of way?"

Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye old friend

You wanted to be free

And somewhere beyond the bitter end is where I wanna be

People working together, making harmony, putting out their own little pulse to make things better, writing songs that can mend or soothe a fractured soul. It's a warm notion in a ragged world, this small thing a songwriter can do that may not be so very small at all.

Patty Griffin plays Auckland tonight (March 15) and tomorrow night at the Tuning Fork, Auckland.