PATTY GRIFFIN – CROWN OF ROSES: REVIEW

PATTY GRIFFIN

Crown Of Roses (PGM Recordings/Thirty Tigers)

DESTRUCTION CAN LEAD to rebuilding, making the old new. There are shelves in every bookstore about doing just that for those post-divorce, post-grief, post-career upheaval. After all, you had the right principles, just the wrong partner or luck or timing or tools or body. Make a better you! Remake your world to accommodate the better you!

But it never works exactly: and not just because post-destruction those bones can’t knit together in quite the same way no matter how you try, the shapes of things bend a bit more than before, fold a bit less, don’t take up the same space. We don’t really change, we just amend. More broadly though, “fixing” you doesn’t fix everyone and everything around you. It doesn’t make shit better. It’s not exactly you, but it’s not a new you and it sure as hell isn’t a new world. So, let’s not pretend it’s fixed and that joy will follow.

The beautiful, compelling Crown Of Roses, from one of the modern greats of songwriting, is a post-destruction album. A realistic one that takes small steps, marks them as valuable, but keeps a wary, practised eye on the path because Patty Griffin isn’t fooled. Things are better; things aren’t great. Or as she puts it in the opening song, “You might lose everything/Spend years in the dark/But it isn’t the end you’re just back at the start.”

As well losing her mother (but, as the compassionate, fragile, Way Up To The Sky shows, with a better grasp on the fractiousness that had marred their relationship and fuelled some of her writing), in the past few years Griffin watched a relationship end, and endured a run of health setbacks that literally robbed her of her voice – with for a time no certainty that it would come back at all. Shitty time you reckon? “Takes a long time, a long time/In this valley of despair,” she sings in Long Time. “Takes a long time, a long time/For someone to find you there.”

Griffin’s voice has returned, albeit not at the same strength but with its innate attraction intact, and it suits the modestly proportioned production here. Crown Of Roses isn’t a “quiet” album exactly – more than an acoustic guitar or two, there are strings in The End, electric blues guitar in Long Time that is repeated and augmented by solid drums in I Know A Way, violin in A Word, mandolin in Born In A Cage, and a full chugging band in Back At The Start – but it stays within its means.

The West Texas ballad, All The Way Home, slightly trembles like a heat shimmer as the border country guitar and violin play back-and-forth around her confident voice, growing more assertive the further the song goes but always remaining as supporting players to the singing. Death hovers, the past creeps close and Griffin declares “I’ve had enough rest and dust in my chest/I need music and smoke on the wind”, and anyone who has enjoyed her craft would understand the impact of that.

If The End feels like a story been told to you personally, touching on a 1950s croon for a song about a fall coming before pride, things are even more intimate in A Word, where Griffin, murmuring of “a secret I had I wanna share with you”, holds you in her arms and speaks of uncertainty being irrelevant, just like history is, and the only thing that counts is the touch you’ve felt.

While hope and connection revive, there is a frankness here about its limitations as well, whether it is in a song like Born In A Cage (reflecting the incessant destruction of the natural world) or the frequent references to the lies we tell ourselves to get through or avoid reality. Maybe faith is one of them, maybe optimism too, maybe love is: the album’s first words are “There’s secrets I don’t tell ever to myself/I just keep moving”.

But Crown Of Roses is an album that navigates traps and barriers with care as much as open eyes. Destruction is evident, tenderness is offered, improvements are happening, miracles do not materialise, life goes on.

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