(BHM) 2x GRAMMY Award-winning artist Patty Griffin has released her new full-length opus, Crown Of Roses. The album, Griffin's 11th studio collection and first in over six years, was produced by longtime collaborator Craig Ross and features musical contributions from her trusted band members David Pulkingham (guitar) and Michael Longoria (drums).
Crown Of Roses drifts from spare folk to gauzy Americana to sly gospel blues over the course of eight moody new songs that evoke the scrubby west of Griffin's adopted Texas and the calming verdancy of her home state of Maine. From the atmospheric "Born In A Cage" and the spectral "Long Time" (which includes a backing vocal cameo from Robert Plant) to the sparse, emotional authenticity of "Way Up To The Sky," Crown of Roses is among Patty Griffin's most profound works to date, continuing her exceptional talent for translating thorny concepts and finely wrought character studies into songs that speak as much to her own experience as they do to the lives of those who have loved her music now for more than three decades.
"If I try to hit things on the nose, they don't feel authentic to me," Griffin says. "If I can emotionally dance around things, it feels like I can be more honest singing it."
Crown Of Roses was heralded in early June with the release of its first song, "Back At The Start." With its purposeful position as song one on side one, "Back At The Start" sets the rich tone for the album, embodying a rhythmic and soulful shadowy shuffle written during the pandemic, junked, and then reclaimed. The murky yet pulsating track sees Griffin probing the idea of letting go of the stories we tell ourselves. It was followed by "Born In A Cage," an atmospheric, western-tinged ballad that contemplates a vanishing world with a beguiling sigh, blending warm fiddle and the warbling of the santur. The song captures what Griffin's mother was experiencing as her time wound down and the natural beauty outside her window changed.
Crown Of Roses sees Patty Griffin once again forming a poetic tapestry woven from the threads of love, loss, grief, disillusionment, resilience, and hope, shifting fluidly between intimate confessions, philosophical musings, and symbolic storytelling - all grounded in intensely human feelings and emotion. Burrowing into the stories she had long been telling herself, the award-winning songwriter ruminates on a vast array of themes and deeply personal topics, spanning the trajectory of women in the 20th and 21st centuries and communion with nature to the sound of her voice after cancer treatment made its mark to the relationship with her late mother, whose wedding day photo graces the album's cover, set into artwork by Mishka Westell that captures many of her greatest loves, including the Maine woods of her - and Patty's - childhood.