A great year of roots and Americana music just got a whole lot better with the announcement of a new Patty Griffin release.
On September 11 in Europe and September 25th in the US (and the rest of the world) Patty Griffin will release ‘Servant Of Love.” This will be her tenth album, and her first to be released on her new self-owned imprint in conjunction with Thirty Tigers. It marks the third time she has collaborated with producer Craig Ross.
In Servant of Love, Patty Griffin digs deep into folk and roots tradition with its grounding in the experience and rhythms of the everyday, but she also writes in the vein of another tradition, less often mined: the transcendentalism of writers like Emerson and Whitman. Grounding itself in the natural world and finding patterns there which speak both to human experience and to the call of the spirit, Griffin’s new album weaves an elemental spell out of the stuff of life.
Griffin suggests that there are twin mysteries at work: the Love that underpins all our human movements-our passions, our desires, our mistakes, our neuroses; and the symmetry in nature that we don’t understand, yet shows up repeatedly, as in the mathematical structure of a seashell or a sunflower. In the vernacular of folk tales, blues cants, and jazz exploration, Servant of Love creates of these seemingly disparate notions a larger narrative of the human place in nature, in society, and in time. Griffin brings her genius for character-driven storytelling to bear on this overarching narrative of mystery. The same transmigrated soul seems to inhabit the characters in these songs, all different, yet all speaking from the same source: the storyteller herself, of course, but also, the album suggests, a greater source, a mysterious source.