Songwriter Savant: Where do Patty Griffin’s songs come from?

From: Slate.com
By: Daniel Menaker
April 17, 2002

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.

“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.”

. . .

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 . . .”

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.

. . .

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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