PATTY GRIFFIN “Servant Of Love” (PGM/Thirty Tigers Records)

By Eleni P. Austin

Patty Griffin is going to break your heart. Not forever, not on purpose, just for the duration of her new album, Servant Of Love.

Patty Griffin was born and raised in Old Town, Maine in 1964.  She is the youngest of seven siblings.  Her father was a high school physics teacher, her mother was a homemaker.  Her family exhibited natural musical ability, her mother and grandparents had beautiful singing voices, but no one ever considered a career in music. As a kid, Patty experienced an epiphany when her dad gave her the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for her birthday.

By age 16, she purchased her first guitar for $50. Influenced by artists like Rickie Lee Jones, Tom Petty, Elvis Costello and Stevie Nicks, she began to write her own songs. Although she wasn’t completely confident about her singing talent, and her family tried to dissuade her, she knew music something she wanted to pursue.

Following high school she got married, relocating to Florida and later Boston. By then, she had put her ambitions on the back burner, concentrating on her marriage, making ends meet by waiting tables. When her marriage ended, Patty returned to her first love: music.

She began supporting herself by playing clubs and coffee houses. Along the way she recorded a demo and began shopping it to labels. Even though ambient noise could be heard on those primitive recordings, the songs garnered enough attention to get Patty a deal with A&M records.

Initially, the label took her back in the studio, trying to augment her spare songs with bigger arrangements and more instrumentation. But that really didn’t capture the raw intimacy of her original demo cassette. So the label basically cleaned that up and released it as Living With Ghosts in 1996.

Two years later, Patty was back with Flaming Red. Her sophomore effort had a bigger sound, incorporating elements of Rock, Folk, Pop and even Trip-Hop. Both albums achieved critical acclaim and moderate sales. She recorded a third album for A&M, right as the label was being swallowed up by a beverage company merger. Suddenly, her music was deemed uncommercial, (or something), and the album, Silver Bell, was shelved.

Patty quickly rebounded, landing at ATO, Dave Matthews’ artist-friendly boutique label. Her first record for them, 2002’s “1,000 Kisses” was a masterpiece. Recorded live in the studio, it included sharp character studies like “Chief,”  “Making Pies,” “Rain” and “Nobody’s Crying.”

While Patty was busy creating songs for herself, astute artists like the Dixie Chicks, Emmylou Harris and Solomon Burke were also discovering her impeccable songcraft. The Dixie Chicks included “Let Him Fly” and “Top Of The World” on their platinum selling albums, Fly and Home.

She followed 1,000 Kisses with a series of flawless albums, the live Kiss In Time, arrived in 2003. Impossible Dream and Children Running Through were released in 2004 and 2007, respectively.

Inspired by the Gospel sounds of the Staple Singers and the Dixie Hummingbirds, Patty teamed up with producer/musician Buddy Miller to record Downtown Church in 2009. She took home a Grammy award for Best Traditional Gospel Album.  Her association with Buddy Miller led to her participation on Robert Plant’s Band Of Joy project. Originally the name of one of his pre-Led Zeppelin groups, Plant resurrected the moniker in 2010.

The line-up included Miller, multi-instrumentalist (and singer- songwriter) Darrell Scott, drummer Marco Giovino, bassist Byron House and Patty. Back in the ‘60s, Band Of Joy’s sound was limited to Blues-Rock.  The 21^st century incarnation offered a wicked combo-platter of Blues, Folk, Country, Soul and Americana. Their self-titled album debuted at #5 on the Billboard Top 200 chart.

Patty’s vocal chemistry with the erstwhile, (self-proclaimed), Golden God Of Rock was immediate and palpable. Soon that translated to their personal lives as well. The couple set up house in Patty’s home in Austin, splitting their time between Texas and Great Britain.

Patty’s 2013 album, American Kid, was inspired by the terminal illness and death of her beloved dad, Lawrence Joseph Griffin. Equal parts restless farewell and a celebration of life, the record took a page from the Byrds and the Bible’s Book Of Ecclesiastes offering a time to mourn and a time to dance. It included two duets with Robert Plant and reached #36 on the Billboard charts.

Perhaps hoping to capitalize on the success of American Kid, Universal Music Group, which subsumed the A&M label, released  her “lost album,” from 2000.  Silver Bell had been recorded in New Orleans with legendary producer Daniel Lanois. As expected, (by everyone except her original scaredy-cat label), it was a worthy addition to her rich body of work.

Sadly, Patty and the Golden God parted company in 2014. While promoting his excellent album, Lullaby And…The Ceaseless  Roar, Plant attributed the break-up to his “Black Country character.” Now she has returned with her 10^th album, Servant Of Love.

It opens tentatively with the title track. She is accompanied by sparse piano notes, L-bowed bass and a serpentine trumpet. But Patty’s vocals take center stage, alternately soaring and keening.  Her simple wish is to “live by the ocean, carry me away, I’m a servant of love. The song’s rich imagery was   inspired by the Magic Realism of authors like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende.

Lyrically, Patty has really broadened her horizons on this record. Three tracks, “250,000 Miles,” “Gunpowder” and “Good And Gone,” take her out of her comfort zone.

Powered by her own piquant guitar tunings, drones (which are similar to bagpipes), drum and Shawn Colvin’s dulcet harmonies, “250,000 Miles” is equal parts Elizabethan madrigal and Middle Eastern dirge.  Here she easily slips into the skin of a worried mother whose daughter has been sold into indentured servitude. “A lady’s maid for ladies who are waiting, she paints the toes, prepares a stranger’s tea/What came before she must forget or bury, or carry deep inside her silently.”

Wed to a slinky, hip-shake rhythm, plus a melody that splits the difference between Hot Jazz and Blues, “Gunpowder” takes aim at corporate greed and the craven desires of the human animal.  Cloaked in her sultry, come-hither style, she delivers a withering portrayal of an amoral capitalist “robbing cradles and the graves”.

“Good And Gone” plays out like a modern day Murder Ballad. An oblique account of the true story of a 22 year old black man, John Crawford. He was shot and killed by police while holding an unloaded pellet gun he had picked up from a Walmart shelf. The police responded to a 911 call that accused Crawford of waving a loaded gun at children in the store. Neither the caller, nor the officer were indicted in the killing.

Much like Bob Dylan’s epochal “Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll” it’s a bleak but vivid portrait of social injustice that remains unchanged after 50 years. The action is propelled by swampy Blues-guitar, kalimba and drones.  Patty never minces words; “I’m gonna make sure he knows his place, wipes that smile right off his face/Find a way to lay him low, I know some things that he don’t know.”

It’s tempting to attribute the most joyful and heartbreaking tracks to her bygone romantic relationship. “Hurt A Little While” is fragile but resolute. The instrumentation is bare-bones, electric guitar, bass and organ, the melody, Blues-inflected.  Coiled and menacing guitar riffs snake through roiling bass lines striking with a “don’t tread on me” alacrity.  Patty confides “It might hurt a little  while, it might hurt a little longer than a little while/But one of these days I’m gonna smile again, one of these days I’m gonna smile.”

Sweet and sun-kissed Spanish arpeggios weave a gossamer tapestry on “Made Of The Sun.”  The poignant lyrics recall happier times; “When The World was only you and your warm arms, I’d look for you, you were the favorite one/Your yesterdays poured into my

tomorrows.”  The infectious melody and Shawn Colvin’s pliant backing vocals almost camouflage the bittersweet memories.

Shawn Colvin is also on hand for the incandescent “Rider Of Days.” Shimmery guitars cascade over the wistful melody. Shawn’s harmonies are warm and symbiotic, the filigreed fretwork is lush and gorgeous. But it’s Patty’s plaintive vocals that will make you catch your breath (every time), as she admits “my darling I miss you, and I always will.”

The clouds lift a little for “Noble Ground” and “Snake Charmer.” Although the lyrics on the former continue to mine the heartache, the tune and instrumentation are equal parts torch and twang. Bluesy guitar chords collide with fluttery piano notes and blowsy trumpet fills, Patty’s mien is defiant and determined as she picks herself up and dusts herself off.

The latter is anchored by chugging, Bo Diddley-meets-Everly Brothers guitar riffs and a strutting rhythm. Patty plays the alluring siren, quietly confident in her powers of snake charm-y persuasion.

Other interesting tracks include the steady and insistent “Everything’s Changed,” along with “There Isn’t One Way.” An accelerated bottleneck Blues number, it features menacing,  slightly  incendiary guitar licks that seem at odds with lyrics that advocate kindness.

The album closes with the one-two punch of “You Never Asked Me” and “Shine A Different Way.”  “You…” is a soaring, albeit hushed piano ballad. Patty’s emotional armor is fully in place in this final relationship post-mortem. She stoically insists “I don’t believe in love like that anyway, I would have told you that if you’d have asked me/The kind of love that comes along once and saves everything between a woman and a man.”

Recalling this life-changing romance, she concedes “It was an exercise in catastrophe, it was a dance of destruction/It was the daze of futility, it was the flight of fragile wings.”  It’s a beautifully devastating song, shot through with recrimination and regret. Happily, it doesn’t end the album on this melancholy note.

The final track finds Patty opting for happiness on “Shine A Different Way.” Propelled by a sharp sunburst of acoustic and baritone guitars, plus accordion and Patty on mandolin, the track is suffused with a sense of optimism and the promise of a brighter future. It offers a brilliant exhale, something like a long night’s journey into day.

For the first album released through her own PGM imprint, Patty and longtime producer, Craig Ross abandoned the pristine perfection of Nashville and recorded the album in her adopted hometown of Austin, Texas. The results are as raw and intimate as the emotions contained in the songs.

“In The Wee Small Hours” by Frank Sinatra,  “Lady In Satin” by Billie Holiday, “Blue” by Joni Mitchell,   “Ingenue”by k.d. lang,  and “Dilate” by Ani DiFranco all have something in common with Patty Griffin’s Servant Of Love.   Each of these watershed records managed to distill the pain of heartbreak and create great art in the process.  To paraphrase Patty, “Something’s lost, but something new begins.”