With her recent album Crown of Roses up for a Grammy this weekend and her searing debut turning 30 this spring, Patty Griffin looks back with Alan Pedder on five of the songs she’s most proud of.
Arriving in the middle of a gold rush for an industry learning how to sell vulnerability, Patty Griffin’s debut album Living with Ghosts offered something quite different from other singer/songwriter albums of the time, shunning both polish and an inflated sense of confession.
What Griffin magnified instead was a closeness that could feel almost confrontational. There’s an intensity to the recording that dared to exist out of step with expectations, with no attempt to soften the edges in post. The emotional directness that record execs were so hungry to market was there, no question, but so too was a complexity that the same gatekeepers weren’t always moved to encourage.
Rather than elevating her subjects into symbols or lessons, songs like “Poor Man’s House” and “Sweet Lorraine” hold them steady, leaving space for the kind of ambiguity that others might be tempted to tidy away. It took me more than 20 years to realise “Sweet Lorraine” is a song about her own mother, for example, partly because it felt too transgressive to be true. Griffin has always had a knack for crafting characters that feel fully present in her songs, even when they’re written to linger just a little out of reach, but with “Sweet Lorraine” she learned the hard way where a line should be drawn between real life and lyrics. “She was so angry,” Griffin admitted to the New York Times last year, “and now that I’m older, I don’t blame her.”
Lorraine passed away about a year ago, aged 93, and it’s her face – a picture from her wedding day – that graces the cover of Crown of Roses, Griffin’s eleventh studio album released last July. It’s something she would likely never have allowed while she was alive, Griffin tells me over video call from her home in Austin, Texas, but it felt right given all that had transpired. Crown of Roses is a lot of things, but most importantly of all it’s a tribute to the slow work of mending their relationship, feeling out new ways to love one another after decades of having drifted apart. As Griffin tells it, for almost 30 years, from the age of 17 upwards, she and her mother were not much more than emotional strangers, stumbling through a communication desert with no sense of common ground. They weren’t uncivil to each other, she says, but “a collection of hurt feelings over time” had left both of them uncertain of their footing, unable to really relate.
An attempt to patch things up by having her mother sing harmonies on the original recording of “Top of the World” (later a hit for The Chicks after Griffin’s version was shelved) only made things worse. “I had her sing out of tune but then the producer retuned it and put her voice in a lower key, a key that she wasn’t supposed to sing in, so it was a bad experience for her,” she says, ruefully. “She was such a beautiful singer and I didn’t even get that right.” When Griffin did finally release her own version of “Top of the World”, on 2004’s Impossible Dream, it was without Lorraine’s harmonies. Instead, she included a recording of both her parents singing the song from which the album takes its name, originally from the musical Man of La Mancha, as an unlisted coda to “Top of the World”.
“My parents loved that soundtrack,” she recalls. “We borrowed records from the library a lot when I was a kid, but Man of La Mancha is the only one I remember my father actually buying, so it was a pretty big deal. I asked my mother to sing on “The Impossible Dream” and brought a really nice tape recorder to their house, but she wasn’t having any of it after what had happened before. But, once my father started going, she did pipe in and they did it in one take.”
Still, it wasn’t until Griffin’s father passed away in 2009 that the gulf between mother and daughter began to feel “quite silly.” Writing songs about her dad for the album American Kid was a catalyst for the realisation that she needed to try and make right with Lorraine. “I felt like I had to lay down my arms and get to know her again, otherwise I was going to regret it,” she explains. “We’d always had similar interests – she gifted those to me when I was kid – so it didn’t feel impossible. It was very stop–start for a while, but we did it, and I was very influenced by that in the making of this record. I mean, anyone being courageous enough to try to meet you in whatever way they can is a pretty powerful thing.”
Nominated for Best Folk Album at the Grammys this weekend – the same category she won with 2019’s self-titled – Crown of Roses is all the more poignant for the fact that it almost never got made. Stuck at home during the pandemic, Griffin thought maybe Covid was a sign that she should call it a day and retire. She was still having trouble with her voice after radiation therapy for breast cancer in 2016 had wrecked it, and any song she tried to write just wound up in the trash. Making another album felt like a mountain too high to climb. “I wasn’t sure I had it in me to do the heavy lifting to recover my voice,” she explains, but little by little, one show after another, it did come back.
"I feel like I have no choice but to be optimistic these days. We have to find a way through this."
For Griffin, the fact that her fans continued to turn out for her again and again and give her “someone to sing to” was reason enough to knuckle down and make the record. “I’m just so grateful and appreciative, so I thought it would be nice to update them with where I am now,” she says. “To sing about things that are happening in my life now, and I didn’t really go beyond that.”
Working with longtime friend and producer Craig Ross, Crown of Roses was recorded over a few months at the tail end of 2024, in between touring and trips to Maine to take her shifts of caring for her mum. Lacking the bandwidth to get involved on the production side, this time Griffin just turned up to the studio and sang, often trusting restraint to serve the same tender purpose that emphasis once did. Where the songs on Living with Ghosts carried an urgency, a need to be voiced, Crown of Roses wears its steadiness in a way that feels both deeply caring and unsentimental. Songs like “The End” and “Way Up to the Sky” – written for Lorraine, though she never got to hear it before she died – are disarmingly profound. What might read as resignation on the page becomes, in Griffin’s bruised voice, a considered form of grace.
Though her songs have often ventured into darkness, Griffin’s hardwired optimism usually finds some way to shine through, and that remains as true now as it ever was, despite the facade of the old world order crumbling to dust. “I feel like I have no choice but to be optimistic these days,” she says, smiling. “I probably have, at the very most, 30 more years of my life, so I have to be hopeful. When I think of my nieces and nephews, I don’t see it as a choice. We have to find a way though this.”
Looking back over three decades of song, Griffin’s choices for her Personal Best are not necessarily ones she thinks could define her for all time. Rather, these are five that have been on her mind lately, whether evergreen fan favourites or songs that have fallen out of her setlists and are asking to come back.
"Poor Man's House" (1996)
BEST FIT: Last time we spoke, you mentioned how Tom Waits has been a huge inspiration for you, particularly in the way he wrote about the lives of poor people and gave them a certain dignity in his songs. That’s something you’ve also done a lot in your career, with “Poor Man’s House” from your debut album being a great example. What makes this song such an important one to you in your catalogue?
PATTY GRIFFIN: It's really personal. When I wrote it, I was living about a mile away from where my Irish grandparents had been servants on a big estate in Boston and I was really haunted by that when I lived there. Their background really influenced me. They came from Ireland, where people were starving and in a very desperate situation, and they had such brains and spirit. They were big readers, intelligent, but they had to sort of flatten themselves out to work servant jobs. They were working for the benefit of future generations, with little pleasure for themselves, and I think that I can relate to those feelings. It’s all for someone else’s kid, and your job is to sort of muddle through.
I think that’s one of the reasons why I live in Texas, so close to Mexico. There’s a large community of Mexican immigrants here, and I feel like I can relate in some way to the experience of sacrificing your own comfort. It’s all for someone else’s kid and your job is to sort of muddle through and to not ask for anything for yourself. Generations go by like that. It’s probably always been that way, somewhere in the world, where people are just so deeply in the shit that they are forced to stay there for a long, long time. I think the Irish spent a lot of time being in the shit, and those desolate feelings followed them to America. Growing up, I realised those feelings were in me too. I was always trying to make myself very small and be of service. Don’t get me wrong, I like being of service and I don’t mind being small. I just don’t want to feel like it’s all there is, or that it has to be that way.
My grandparents had passed away by the time I moved to that place in Boston, but my father had grown up there and I was feeling all this weight that he was still carrying around from his upbringing. It can take generations and generations to work yourself out of extreme poverty, out of tragedy, and it’s exhausting. It probably changes the DNA in your body after a time, you know?
Before making Living with Ghosts, you spent some years waiting tables and experiencing firsthand the appalling attitudes that some people have towards people of a working-class background. Were you drawing on that as well, when writing this song?
I think, for the first time in my life, I was thinking about where my expectations had been set and about my ideas of what my life could be. I knew I really wanted to pursue music but there was also this thing, this voice in me that was really resistant to the idea, telling me to I had to be realistic. But then I thought, well, other people are doing it and making it work, why is it not something that I can do too? All that was going on inside of me, and I came to realise it was a gift from the past. And it really is a gift, as an artist, to have a point of view like that, because I think it’s a universal story. We’re really up against that story right now, the haves and the have nots.
I was thinking about that, listening back to this song. Particularly the line “nothing is louder to God’s ears than a poor man’s sorrow,” because it feels so painfully and criminally at odds with what the so-called Christian right are doing in the US right now. They’re some of the loudest voices supporting the terrorising of undocumented immigrants, being kidnapped into vans off the streets. So I think “Poor Man’s House” continues to be relevant in different ways.
I think I go forth in it too. Actually, what happened with the Irish is a really good example of the disease of the spirit in America. After a generation or two they were able to pass as regular white people in society, and many of the horrifically inhuman politicians we have in this country come from those families who were once outcasts. So many of them have Irish last names and it makes me feel so sick to my stomach because I know where their ancestors came from, and most of them came out of some kind of dire situation.
It's really so crushing, but I think it also explains a lot of why these attitudes are so prevalent. My theory is that these people are just so afraid of being seen as having come from that sort of background. There’s a caste system here in America that is barely recognised, and it’s all based on economics. People are afraid to be seen as having any association with poverty, because if you are seen in that light – and the English know this very well – you’re much more vulnerable in society. Within all this right-wing Christian crap is this very misguided idea that it’s somehow going to protect them from any kind of trouble or agony, and it couldn’t be more opposite, you know? It creates this whole other thing.
I love the harsh strumming that you end the song with. It feels powerful, as if it holds all the frustration and pain that you are singing about. How was it in the early days when you started playing this song out? What was the reaction?
People related to it – and it's not a literal kind of song, so that was interesting. I made fans with this song that I don't think would necessarily have paid attention to anything else I've done, before or since. I've gotten letters from people about this specific song, so there’s something about it that people respond to. For me, there’s just something that feels really true about this song when I sing it, so I’m really happy that it resonates with others too.
Going back to what you said about it not being a literal kind of song, I don't think I'd ever heard someone sing about poverty in such a way. You’re coming from these different angles that are really interesting. On one hand really humanising the people whose lives are so hard, and on the other using this almost mocking tone that flips the script.
That’s the voice inside you that says you can’t have a better life, that your life’s plan is defined by a poverty you’ll never break out of. But the song is also about all of us, you know? – “Everybody we’re living in a poor man’s house” – it’s like we are all vulnerable. That’s not something I was thinking about when I wrote the song. I wasn’t thinking ‘Oh, we are all going to be vulnerable one day,’ but now I feel like that’s true.
This year marks the 30th anniversary of Living with Ghosts. Are there any plans for a first-time vinyl release?
I don't know who has the masters even. Universal had everything and then they had that big warehouse fire, so I don't know.
Sheryl Crow thought for a long time that she’d lost her early albums in the fire and it eventually turned out that she didn't, so you never know.
Well, it's amazing for them to not have to find things they don't really want to find, right? We had a fight. It's a shitshow. I’ll say no more. I don't even want to know if they're around or not.
"Mother of God" (2004)
BEST FIT: You've chosen two songs from your album Impossible Dream, but let’s talk about “Mother of God” first as I think it predates the other since you originally recorded it for the long-shelved Silver Bell album. This song has been on an interesting journey, and I’d love to hear a bit more about that and what it means to you.
PATTY GRIFFIN: Well, it’s a song about my family. A very specific story, like a snapshot of my family when I was a kid in the ‘70s. My mum was a teacher and a really smart lady who had seven children in seven years, so she was very overextended. Only someone as smart and resourceful as she would be able to manage for as long as she did. But, you know, if the pressure gets too strong in one area and the person running the whole show has to fall down for a little while, then the whole thing falls apart. So this song is part of the story of my childhood and talking about that moment, but it’s really more about how it felt to be a kid at that time than about her specifically.
I can't go into detail about what happened, because I don't want to piss anyone off in my family, but it felt like everything changed overnight. I learned that can happen at a young age, and it felt like a rug had been pulled out underneath me. I think a lot of people have experiences like that. Things always seems like they should be so simple when you’re a kid. You’re like, but things were this way last week, why are they suddenly so different? That’s one of the differences between kids and grown-ups, and I think that kids are smarter sometimes, you know?
Do you have a favourite lyric or image from the song? Is there something that really speaks to you in the lyrics now, 25 years later?
I don’t think it’s anything specific. I like this song because it always feels fresh to me. I sing it a lot and never feel sick of it. It’s got so many pictures that paint my childhood for me. Ours was a very Catholic family and we had a lot of Virgin Marys all over the house. I had a Virgin Mary calendar in my room and I would just stare and stare and stare at her, watching her mouth move and imagine that she was saying something to me – just keep going, or something like that. But I didn’t really believe. I wasn’t fully committed to that idea. My brain was probably trying to create things that would comfort me. But all these things are why I’m so attached to this song. And, again, it’s another song about things taking time to heal.
Right. Your last words in the song are “Maybe things will be alright / I don’t know,” and it’s so beautifully sung. The version of “Mother of God” on Silver Bell was a few minutes shorter, so at what point did you realise that, yes, this extended, beautiful outro is what the song really needed?
I had Ian McLagan come in to play on that record. He’s passed away now but he was living here in Austin when we met. He’d say things like “If you ever want me to come and play anything, I’d be happy to,” but when I asked him to play the piano part on this song, he refused to do it. He said, “You need to play that yourself.” I’m a better piano player now than I was then, but I remember it was quite an ordeal at that time, to be able to play piano and sing at the same time with any accuracy. He told me I just needed to get more comfortable with it, and I think after that I got brave enough to think about doing an outro, so I have Ian to thank for that.
"Cold as it Gets" (2004)
BEST FIT: I only discovered recently that you wrote this song from the perspective of a Holocaust survivor, sort of. What’s the story there?
PATTY GRIFFIN: It’s based on a documentary I saw about a group of prisoners of war who were kept underground by the Nazis in very cold, very dark salt mines, which sounds horrific really. When they were liberated all the guards had already fled the scene, but there was one guy who said he just took off running, trying to find this one guard who had done so much harm to him and his friends. He could barely stand but he was just running and running looking for this person who was long gone. It didn’t make any logical sense. He just felt like he needed to track this guy down and kill him.
After I watched that, I started to think about how treating people in such a horrific way can affect their minds. When you take away someone’s liberty and their humanity away, the effects of that just go on and on, recreating this coldness over and over and over again. You’d think he would have been really desperate to go home and see his family or something, but all he wanted in that moment was to find this guy. I found that so interesting and kind of devastating, and that all went into this song. And, of course, thinking about the many Holocaust survivors who have spent pretty much their whole lives trying to track down the guards who escaped justice. It makes me really sad.
You’ve said before that a lot of the songs from Impossible Dream were coming from these dark places that you hadn’t really explored before, and that it was kind of a struggle to figure out how you wanted to tell those stories. Was that the case with “Cold as it Gets”?
Well, I wrote that song after America had invaded Iraq and all that was going on. You know, Austin is a liberal town, but I got into fights with people here about this. There was so much propaganda for invading Iraq in those days, and a lot of people really believed that America needed to do that. Some really smart people I know were tricked into believing that we needed to invade Iraq, and I couldn’t understand that. It’s not like I was saying protect Saddam Hussein, but I was saying ‘Don’t kill all of these people for no reason,’ just because you’re afraid of something. I was devastated at the time that so many fine people were signed up to do that, because they were told and they trusted that it was necessary. I think a lot of them kind of lost their minds and their wellbeing later when they discovered that it was not in fact necessary, and the invasion of Iraq was not about weapons of mass destruction at all.
My father was a World War II vet, and I really feel like the moment we invaded Iraq was the beginning of the end for his mental health. He was so devastated by it and thought there was no justifiable reason for it, other than that somebody somewhere was probably going to make a lot of money from it. We talked about it a lot, and he was really broken by it. I think a lot of people were. I remember in those years we had one amazing person after another from the previous generations passing away, and I couldn’t help but think it was partly because they were so disappointed and devastated by America being a part of this great lie in the world. Because we were, and we still are.
Right. It’s hard to hear this song now, in 2025, and not think of “the million sad stories at the side of the road” of the Palestinian people and the people of Sudan, and all the other places around the world that are embedded in all this senseless violence.
Absolutely. And America too, which, you know, was literally built on the genocide of the Native Americans. We need to at least acknowledge that, and the fact that so many people in the United States are descendants of slaves. We need to acknowledge the fact that there is still so much violence going on against Native Americans and against Black people. It isn’t just in the past. That’s why America feels it can go and invade a country like Iraq and dehumanise anyone who gets caught up in the crossfire.
As a kid, growing up in this country, we were always at war with somebody or part of some kind of conflict. It was really rare to have a moment where we weren’t, so people would desensitise themselves to what was really happening. The government let us see what war looks like back in the Vietnam days, and then never let us see it again. They learned their lesson about what was allowed to be shown to regular people, and I think that’s what’s really fascinating about right now. What’s happening in Palestine has changed the way a lot of people see power and how it works on the planet. It’s certainly changed the way that I see it, and I think we are right to feel like we shouldn’t have to be a part of those systems of power. We have to figure out a better way. I’m going off on a tangent here, but there was a lot of that sort of thinking going into that song too.
"Rider of Days" (2015)
BEST FIT: This was the first single from Servant of Love, which was the first album you made after the end of your relationship with Robert Plant. Did you find the level of public interest in that relationship uncomfortable? I seem to remember there was quite a lot of speculation about what this record would sound like, which must have been weird. What was that time like for you?
PATTY GRIFFIN: There was a lot of grief around, but not necessarily because of that relationship. I had a lot going on, a lot of losses at that time, and losing Robert was just one of them. It was a very tumultuous time in my life, period, and Robert was just in the mix, really. But through him I discovered that the ‘being famous’ thing is very, very awful. It's quite a burden to have in your life, and to have hanging all that over you.
But “Rider of Days” was not about losing Robert, it was about losing somebody else who’d died. I think there’s an innocence to that song. Because although you don’t ever get used to grief, it does get less shocking. In my early experiences with grief, it was always so shocking. I think, when you’re younger, it can feel more devastating in a certain way because it’s the permanence of that person not being there that’s so difficult to get used to. That changing relationship with grief is kind of what “Rider of Days” is about. It made me realise how tiny our lives are. We are here just for a moment, you know? I also chose it because I like that it’s pretty.
I think, like many of the best songwriting ideas, it’s quite simple but also quite profoundly beautiful. Again, you take an approach that I don’t think I’d really heard before. What do you recall about the writing of this song? Was it one that just kind of poured out of you?
Yeah, it was. And it was also one of the last songs that wanted to pour out of me in a big voice. I was kind of losing my interest in singing like that, and that’s one of the reasons why I haven't carried on playing “Rider of Days” in my shows.
I used to need to sing big and loud, and that's definitely changed for me. It's a very athletic way to sing, and I felt weird all the time. Age is probably a big part of it, and then I got cancer and had a whole bunch of technical things happen to my body that made it really hard to belt notes. I want to find a new arrangement for the song to really enjoy singing it again. I need to resurrect it somehow, because I do feel like it has a power that I didn’t even know it had when I wrote it. I was just getting stuff out of me. But when I listen to it now, I feel like, holy cow, there’s something in there that I want to say – that I have to say – in my shows.
You have Shawn Colvin on backing vocals on this track. You two are old friends, right?
Yeah, I’ve known Shawn for a long time, since 1997, though I haven’t seen her in a while. We live in the same town but our paths haven’t crossed in a couple of years. She invited me to open shows for her around time of her album A Few Small Repairs. Her record company wanted her to tour with somebody else, but because she had this big, big record with “When Sunny Came Home” she said, “Well, I really want Patty to do this.” They were like, “Okay, she can play for 10–15 minutes to start the show,” and so that’s what I did.
When you look back at the ‘90s and read about how much record companies hated having two women on the same bill, or playing two women one after the other on the radio, it seems so insane and prehistoric. But it wasn’t that long ago. We seem to have moved past that particular obstacle course, by and large.
[laughs] Well, you know, Beyoncé is the Rolling Stones now!
"The End" (2025)
PATTY GRIFFIN: It’s interesting, being a songwriter, because every time I put out a record with a pile of songs that mean everything, I think, ah, I got that done. I got all that stuff out. But then, within a couple of years, it’s not enough. Because of the way that life goes in cycles, things end but then you just have to go round again, and you just keep starting over and over.
Getting older, I think you can really recognise that the ending is coming before it really materialises, just through all that’s happening in your life. Life starts showing you different directions – This way! Oh no, that’s wrong… how about this way that you’ve never gone before? – and at first you don’t even want to look, but finally you do. And once you do see it, you’re already starting to move on.
For me, “The End” is about that moment. It’s about the vulnerability and the humility you have to be willing to have in order to start again. You have to be willing to look at all of the things that you’ve failed at, and as I get older it’s really quite a lot to sort through. At my age, when you are going through one of those times where everything in your life is shifting into a different place, the truth is that there aren’t as many of those times left. So I think I am paying more attention now, to the changes.
BEST FIT: That makes sense, and gives me something to think about too. A lot of the things you sing about in this song are things that I’m still learning to do when it comes to endings and beginnings.
I think there’s a lot of freedom that comes with swallowing your pride. That’s why, in the song, I made it into a big butterfly inside of your chest. It’s a nervous thing, yes, but it also gives you an anything-can-happen kind of feeling. If you look at it that way, I think it’s easier to put down your defences, like pride and other things. I mean, it’s okay to be proud up to a point. I just have to watch myself that I don’t get stuck for years because of it. Not that I necessarily even mind being stuck. I’ll just stay stuck if I don’t have to change. I’m like, ‘Oh well, I guess I’m stuck. But I like it here, I know where everything is.’
We have to talk about the strings on this track, because the ending is just so huge.
Steven Barber put the strings on the record. He’s out local, brilliant classical composer and has worked with Craig Ross on some soundtrack stuff. I worked with him on my last record, but not with strings.
I was taking care of my mum at the time, so I had to watch the whole thing on FaceTime. It was a particularly bad day as she was getting close to the end, so it was kind of an insane feeling to be watching someone arranging strings for your songs while being with a parent who was dying. It’s so powerful to me, what he did. Really magical.
Of all the songs on Crown of Roses, what is it about “The End” that stands out for you as a favourite?
As a song, it's really tiny. It's small. But I think it has a punch to it. One of my goals in recent years has been to really work on speaking more softly and not yelling as much. There's already a lot of yelling going on in the world. I don't need to be a part of that anymore. Let somebody else, someone younger, do the yelling, and I’ll tell my stories that way I want to.
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