Patty Griffin hits Memphis for American Kid’s groove

AUSTIN, Texas - To record her new album, American Kid, Patty Griffin went to Memphis to play with brothers Luther and Cody Dickinson of the North Mississippi Allstars, who had opened for Robert Plant’s Band of Joy.

Her objective: to incorporate the Dickinsons’ Memphis flavor into her sound. “They have a way of playing notes and grooves that feels like they listened to a lot of Stax records,” Griffin said.

That groove is definitely on the album - produced by Austin’s Craig Ross, it’s her seventh overall and first collection of original material since 2007’s Children Running Through - but not so much that it overshadows Griffin’s voice and her songwriting, which shine throughout. From opener “Wherever You Wanna Go” onward, her voice, rich and bright, is out front. That holds even on the more melancholy material,such as the heartbreaking “Wild Old Dog.” “It’s lonely on the highway/sometimes a heart can turn to dust,” she sings, sad and forceful, backed by a warm acoustic ensemble.

The songs on the album were five years in the making, driven in part by Griffin’s experience with her father as he was dying. “I was trying to get myself ready for it,” said Griffin, who grew up in the Northeast but now lives in Austin. “That’s my thing that I do, I write songs when I’m trying to get myself through things.”

Griffin said that writing songs about her father, who wasn’t in a place to have conversations about how he was feeling, helped her feel closer to him. “It’s really healing to me to have these songs now about him. I’m glad I spent so much time getting close to him in my work,” she said. “I still have that, now that he’s gone.”

The title of the album comes from one of its quieter songs, “Not a Bad Man,” which Griffin said is connected to her father, though not explicitly based on him. The original idea came from a news story about an Iraq War veteran with mental illness, who eventually died. “I realized after that my father was a World War II vet, and I think that so much of his being, the way he was in his world, was affected by the years that he spent in that war, and coming back here to a country that just wanted to move on, sohe did, too.”

The idea of what it means to be an American kid - an Iraq War veteran or a World War II veteran or something completely different - struck Griffin as an appropriate title, given the seemingly unending variety of American experiences.

“My father, he grew up in a city in the Northeast, and there were horse and buggies still on the streets delivering things, and then there were Scud missiles flying around at the last part of his life,” she said.

Another song on the album that touches on American history, “Ohio,” also features a contribution from LedZeppelin singer and part-time Austin resident Plant. The hazy, droning song, which was written to be sung by someone else, was based on a story about the Underground Railroad in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. “It’s American history,” Griffin said.

Plant helped her get through difficulties she was having with the arrangement of the song. “I just really couldn’t get a feel for it and Robert kind of cracked the code,” she said. “I was just singing it too loud - a little less Florence and the Machine, please - and then we worked on the groove together and that helped it to flow.” Griffin added that the time that she spent performing with Plant - who she said is her “sweetheart” - in Band of Joy helped her become a better guitar player.

“I had a lot harder work to do on the guitar, and work that I was much more conscientious about because I was backing somebody else up, not myself,” she said. “There’s a lot more that I know how to paint with now on the guitar, rhythmically and otherwise; my left hand works a lot better now.”

Style, Pages 43 on 06/09/2013

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