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Songwriter SavantWhere do Patty Griffin's songs come from?

By Daniel Menaker
Posted Wednesday, April 17, 2002, at 3:51 PM ET

Songwriters often say that they don't know where their works come from, that they seem to come from outside themselves. In any given interview you might hear Bono, Alanis Morissette, Gillian Welch, or John Hiatt say so. Last week I talked to the accomplished and idiosyncratic country/pop/folk/whatever singer/songwriter Patty Griffin—on the day before the release of her third CD, 1000 Kisses (ATO Records)—and she was insistent on this very point: that there is something bigger than just herself involved in writing her songs.

For a long time, these kinds of artistic disavowals struck me as coy, or merely attempts at modesty, or, conversely, grandiose claims of divine or spiritual inspiration. Or as an effort to inject interest and connectedness into a process that is often lonely, tedious, frustrating, heartbreaking, and unsuccessful. But recently, with 40 years' worth of listening and editing and writing experience perhaps reaching a critical mass, I've come to realize that most people who make this sort of artist-savant claim actually believe and mean exactly what they say.

Griffin is a good case in point. Like many songwriters (her work has been covered by the likes of Emmylou Harris and the Dixie Chicks), she sometimes starts with the music—with a phrase or a bit of melody, with a guitar riff—and the words come later. But when they do, "they seem to come from nowhere," she says—"they just sort of pop out." At other times, she simply sits and makes silly rhymes. "For 20 minutes or a half an hour I'll just make nonsense rhymes or just rhymes about my dog," she says. "And then serious ones begin to happen." Songwriting can be a physical discipline for her, as well. "Often I have to move my body in a certain way, like exercising, to begin to get into the right rhythm for writing a song." When she said this, she moved her shoulders around in a swimming kind of way, to show what she meant. (Onstage, when she isn't playing the guitar, Griffin's arms become anemonelike, tentacular, in a distinctive, wavy style; from far away—as when I saw her open for the Dixie Chicks at Radio City Music Hall a while back, and, before that, for Harris at the Beacon Theater in New York—these movements look mannered, but closer up, they seemed entirely natural.)

Her lyrics, which often repeat themselves in repeated musical phrases, are trancelike, as well—as if the author were in some way possessed. In "Mary," an anthemic three-chord song whose words appear to marry Jesus' mother and Mary Magdalene and Everywoman, from Griffin's second CD, she sings:

Mary,
You're covered in roses
You're covered in ashes
You're covered in rain
You're covered in babies,
You're covered in slashes,
You're covered in wilderness,
You're covered in stains.

And from the new CD, in "Be Careful," another three- or four-chorder, similarly poignant about the general lot of women: "Be careful how you bend me/ Be careful where you send me/ Careful how you end me ..." This chorus is preceded by haunting and even more incantational verses that are essentially lists of women in different attitudes and situations ("All the girls on the telephone/ All the girls sitting all alone …" etc.).

It's not surprising that Griffin and many others like her honestly feel in the grip of something "beyond" themselves, feel "inspired" (a word whose root means "breathe in," as the oracle breathed in psychoactive fumes at Delphi), when they are writing music. These creative experiences have a long, grand tradition and literature. (Plato, an early proponent of this idea, says that "all good poets, epic as well as lyric, composed their beautiful poems not by art but because they are inspired and possessed.") What did come as something of a surprise to me in our conversation was the vehemence of Griffin's resistance to the possibility that she and she alone is responsible for her music. When I said I thought that "inspiration" might actually not be anything mystical but just the unconscious, creative right brain delivering artifacts to the conscious left hemisphere, she not only disagreed but seemed upset about the notion. "There has be something more than that," she said. "The mystery is beyond that. The fact that you're writing about experiences you've never had shows that. I mean, sometimes the whole room alters when I'm writing a song."

Part of Griffin's unwillingness to take full authorial credit for her work may have to do with the fact that she appears to be a truly self-effacing person, and she has known hard times: a bad marriage, six years of waitressing at Pizzeria Uno in Boston, classic record-industry horror stories. She is one of seven children, was born in Old Town, Maine, and is from a family that has had to work hard for a living. She has lived and feels keenly the lot of the marginal, especially working-class women and outcasts of various kinds. Her songs reflect often these concerns: "Tony," about a gay boy in high school "with breasts like a girl" who commits suicide; "Making Pies," on the new CD, about a bakery worker who does the same tedious job every day in order to make a living; the quasi-feminist songs "Mary" and "Be Careful"; Bruce Springsteen's "Stolen Car"; "Chief," on the new CD, about a nonfunctional Native American Army vet; etc.

When she talks about these songs, it's clear that she wants them to express, in their lyrical way, the suffering associated with broad social problems. She says, for example: "There's an imbalance when if a woman goes out for a walk at 3 in the morning and something happens to her it was somehow her fault, and with a man that's not true." So it makes sense that she would believe so passionately that she is somehow channeling these elegiac, quasi-protest songs. She needs to believe that she is being spoken through, and may fear that taking the credit—being a musical auteur—will undermine what she sees as a sort of mission.

In a limited way, she's wrong, as every other artist and Plato are when they assert that the human artist is the instrument of some greater force. Unless the person involved is one of the many plagiarists at large these days, he and he alone made the work. But in a broader way she's quite right. The brain is, from one way of looking at it, the receptacle—the vessel—for all kinds of information, data, stimuli from the outside world, and, often without any intellectual plan, the mind of the artist will synthesize and structure and give emotional depth to some portion of these stimuli, will chew them up, and spit out art. In that way the artist is an instrument after all—an instrument played by the inchoate world around him.

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Daniel Menaker is executive editor at HarperCollins.
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


The remarkable thing about Patty Griffin's songs is the compassion that she conveys for the people she writes about--even when she's angry or critical, Griffin is never mean, and she always moves in the direction of trying to understand the other instead of doing a cheap angry-white-female slam. It speaks volumes that this sort of empathy makes for bolder and more radical music than what comes from musicians more often hailed as "cutting edge."

--David

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


Having recently been inspired to read a bit about hypnosis, I'm convinced that the capacity for self-hypnosis is the key to many high-performance endeavors whether they be sporting or artistic. The little unconsciously-performed rituals of baseball batters, the breathing rituals of weightlifters, the repetitive visualization exercises of free-throw shooters, the rhythmic lyrics and movements described in the article all seem indicative of individual entering a state of extremely focused attention concurrent with a slightly altered state of mind: the feeling of being "in the zone." What is that outside force generating lyrics, melodies or multi-game hit streaks? It's our insides! It's what the mind can do when we let it, but we need to train ourselves to get out of the way and that's the trick.

--Pitchfork

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


With regard to Daniel Menaker's review of Patty Griffin and the theme of inspiration, it's worth mentioning that Plato's agenda in advocating inspiration is precisely to discredit the authority of art by marginalizing it as irrational.

The birth of philosophy was as painful as any birth, and in order to claim a space for the still fledgling discipline of philosophy, Plato needed to reduce the scope and authority of art, particularly of epic poetry. It is hard to find a kind word for Homer anywhere in Plato. The blind bard suffers the final indignity from Plato when he is booted, along with all other artists barring ideological propagandists, out of the Republic. On the whole, Plato finds art to be a corrupting influence, and I imagine that our current society today would be to him nothing less than appalling, a real test of his stoicism.

Aristotle, while much kinder on the whole towards artists, still devotes far less time to the intimidating father-figure of Homer, devoting most of his attention to the more contemporaneous dramatists (and pulling the majority of his illustrative examples from drama as well).

In any case, Mr Menaker's brief reference to Plato in the context of the review might suggest to some that for Plato the "inspired" artist was on a higher plane. Nothing could be further from the truth. According to Plato, the way to the higher plane was via stoicism and a measured, reasoned march to an elevated understanding of a world of ideals, culminating in "to kalon"--the ideal category of "the good."

In this view, all art was a gadfly, a distraction, and in Plato/Socrates' words "an imitation of an imitation," far more destructive an influence on young and old alike than Socrates ever was.

While I would never hold to Plato's rather extreme position (few moderns would), it is refreshing, even millenia later, to see someone with integrity holding to an unpopular line on principle. Our growing cultural disdain for reason and articulation are fed in part by the over-glorification music.

When was the last time you saw anyone advance the claim that music, while one essential part of a full and rich human experience, has simply become overrated? It is a tremendously powerful tool for advertising and propaganda precisely because it poses such a powerful, unarticulated emotional appeal, regardless of what words are slapped onto the melody.

--Kip Soteres

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

(4/18)

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