Patty Griffin’s Family Affair

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For a number of years, Patty Griffin has found herself frequently making the thirteen hour trip from Austin to Nashville, and she attributes a great deal of the inspiration for her latest record to the time spent listening to country music on those long drives. American Kid is a wealth of styles and sounds – there are country dirges and psychedelic ragas, parlor waltzes and haunting hymnals – but the rhythm of the highway winds its way through the record’s dusty sound. One can hear the highs and lows of the road in the tranquil beauty of the Griffin/Plant duet “Highway Song” and the high lonesome abandonment in “Faithful Son.” “I think that with the flavors of the melodies and everything, there’s a lot coming out of driving and listening to country music,” Griffin says. “Tom T. Hall, Kris Kristofferson, Don Williams, Lefty Frizzell, lots of Lefty, and George Strait even. There was something about driving through that landscape and listening to country music that really was moving to me and kept me going.”

Sometimes, those long trips provided inspiration for song. On one drive, Griffin was approaching the Texas border during sunset when from her window she noticed a stray dog racing down the highway. That simple, striking image became “God Is A Wild Dog,” a story about a family’s decision to abandon their aging pet that Griffin commands, transforming the tale into a chilling meditation on faith and hopelessness. “It’s lonely on the highway, sometimes a heart can turn to dust” she sings in her bare soprano during the bridge, wondering if anyone can really conquer the road without losing something.

Griffin’s vocal talents are on full display in her latest collection. Her voice bends to fit her music, country crooning and blues barking with equal ease. She shifts mid-song from whisper to cry and back again on “Irish Boy,” a clear display of Griffin’s ability to sing to and for her material. American Kid is further proof that to dismiss or downplay Griffin’s own recording in favor of her songwriting for others is to ignore a central component of her craft.

Indeed, as her songbook has continued to provide material for a great many performers, Patty Griffin has spent the last seven years re-focusing her career as a singer and performer in her own right. She reined in her narrative folk storytelling for 2007’s Children Running Through, an album of pop melody and plain-spoken pathos that includes the plaintive “Up To The Mountain.” “You go see somebody like Willie Nelson and every single person right to the back row is engaged” Griffin said in a 2007 interview with American Songwriter, “I guess now I’m getting so old that I really do want sing-a-longs.”

Griffin continued to stray from dense lyricism as she increasingly found inspiration in the melodies and emotional display of gospel. That fascination culminated in 2010’s Downtown Church, an album of gospel standards and traditionals that featured Griffin’s own songwriting on only two songs. Several years of paring down her writing and focusing more on performance and vocal emotion has indeed changed Griffin as an artist. “More and more in my older years I see that although lyrics are important, as far as a songwriter’s job goes, they should carry a melody,” she explains. “The ideal is to carry a voice and to carry emotion, and I’m more and more entrenched in that after the gospel record.”

American Kid was recorded thirty miles south of Memphis at Zebra Ranch in Coldwater, Mississippi, the onetime recording studio of legendary Memphis producer Jim Dickinson now operated by Luther and Cody. Discussing her decision on how to approach the follow up to her widely acclaimed Downtown Church, Luther Dickinson applauds Griffin’s willingness to try something new. “It’s hard to follow that, I thought she was very brave,” Dickinson says. “There’s this Grammy winning, amazing gospel record recorded in a beautiful church and I just love her strategy, ‘Well, lets go down to this barn in Mississippi and record with these crazy guys.’” As Griffin puts it, “I’m always a zig-to-the-zag girl. My gut was if you’re doing this record that’s steeped in Austin and Nashville, you should go to Mississippi.”