Patty Griffin's Life Fell Apart. Rebuilding Gave Her Music a Jolt.
In the early '90s, Griffin recorded a series of simple demos to get gigs within Boston's songwriter circuit. She had written 'Sweet Lorraine' — a biographical snapshot of her mother's rough-and-tumble upbringing — in a flash. But as hubbub grew about the diminutive redhead with the enormous voice, every label interested in Griffin demanded that 'Sweet Lorraine' appear on her 1996 debut, 'Living With Ghosts.' She'd never thought Lorraine would hear it.
'She was so angry, and now that I'm older, I don't blame her,' Griffin said recently during a video interview from her home in Austin, as her dog, Buster, nuzzled her. 'That was stepping across a line.'
On her 10 albums since that debut, Griffin has pinballed between post-grunge rock and graceful folk, between Spanish balladry and sizzling blues, even duetting with Mavis Staples before cutting a country-gospel wonder in Nashville. As she wrote about civil rights and bigotry, adventure and lust, she continued to examine her difficult childhood and relationship with Lorraine in many of her most tender but tough songs.
Those family tunes culminate on her new album, 'Crown of Roses,' out July 25, with the arresting 'Way Up to the Sky.' On 'Sweet Lorraine,' she blamed her mother's problems on her past. But on 'Way Up to the Sky,' Griffin shoulders some of the blame, singing about being the youngest of seven children who rarely made their mother feel valued amid a collapsing marriage in a cash-strapped household held together by Catholicism and convenience. Lorraine never heard 'Way Up to the Sky.' She died in February at 93.
'I wanted to know all the secret stuff in her heart, what those days were like when she was sad and lost and broke and unappreciated,' Griffin, 61, said with a rueful chuckle. 'It was hard to get that close to it, because she had been so angry with us for so long — especially me.'
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