Patty Griffin on Channelling Illness, Loss, and Renewal into Songs of Resilience

I vividly recall my first spin of Patty Griffin’s debut album, Living with Ghosts, back in 1996. The singer-songwriter scene was booming at the time, and stacks of CDs from all sorts of talented newcomers filled the Acoustic Guitar office, but Living with Ghosts stood alone. Essentially a set of solo acoustic demos, the album’s songs and performances were absolutely gripping. Griffin, just emerging from the clubs and coffeehouses of the Boston area, wrote, played, and sang as if her life depended on it.

Nearly 30 years later, I’m on a video call with Griffin from her home in Austin, Texas, soon after the release of Crown of Roses, her 12th studio album. I share my memory of meeting on one of her first national tours following the release of Living with Ghosts, and ask how she looks back on her intense entrée as a singer-songwriter. 

“It was completely cathartic,” she says. “When I wrote that stuff I had been at service jobs, you know. The point of a service job is to make things happen for other people and be as invisible as possible most of the time. I actually love service jobs for that reason—I think they suit my personality really well. The only thing I don’t love about them is how people don’t pay them enough respect. That can get exhausting. 

“I think I had a lot of things to get off my chest. It had never occurred to me I could use my music to do that until a few years before that record came about.”

Living with Ghosts launched Griffin’s career as one of the most revered singers and songwriters of her generation—with seven Grammy nominations and two wins for best traditional gospel album (2010’s Downtown Church) and best folk album (2019’s Patty Griffin); covers of her songs by the Chicks, Emmylou Harris, Linda Ronstadt, Kelly Clarkson, and many more; an extended stint in Robert Plant’s Band of Joy; and an Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement Award for songwriting.

In the last decade, Griffin has also faced major physical and emotional challenges, as she contended with cancer and radiation treatments that drastically altered her voice, and with the recent passing of her mother, whose turbulent life Griffin depicted on Living with Ghosts in the searing ballad “Sweet Lorraine.”

Griffin’s latest work, Crown of Roses, reflects all these experiences in a deeply moving set of songs infused with folk, gospel, country blues, and dashes of flamenco. On some tracks Griffin turns the guitar duties over to her longtime accompanist David Pulkingham, who brings gorgeous Spanish colors to songs like “Born in a Cage” and “All the Way Home.”

Griffin’s voice on Crown of Roses is definitely different than in years past, but as this conversation explores, she’s leaning into the changes and discovering new powers as a singer, songwriter, and guitarist. 

Throughout your career there’s been a big focus—understandably—on your singing. I’m curious to know more about how you started on guitar. What music did you learn?

You know, the music that I listened to, that I aspired to do, was so beyond my reach technically that it took all the pressure off of me. My philosophy from going out and doing cover gigs was that any way you can get through the song, as long as you can get through the song, it doesn’t have to be right [laughs]. That was my approach to guitar playing for many years. 

At one point Buddy Miller said, “I love watching you play guitar. It’s so completely wrong, everything about it, and that’s what I love about it.” I’ve taken guitar lessons in the last ten years, a couple of them from David Pulkingham, and learned a few things here and there. I love my open tunings because they make me feel like I’m a much better guitar player than I probably am.

Guitar is more of a drum for me than anything else. It’s all about my right hand. I wish it was more about my left. I think in another lifetime I must have been a drummer, because I am a fidgeter. I am one of these people that walks down the street, and a truck’s backing up and it makes a “doot doot doot,” and I start doing a rhythm off the “doot doot doot” in my head. It’s just an automatic thing. 

When you were learning guitar, did you have any particular models, or were you just trying to get those rhythms out that you heard?

It’s really trying to get the rhythms out. I remember listening to Gladys Knight and the Pips and going, “Well, how do I play that rhythm on an acoustic guitar with knowledge of three chords?” It is actually a fun way to write songs: to sit and make some noise playing, going into a rhythm that’s off of your ability level and learning. You don’t have to get it right, you know what I mean? Just exploring rhythm, to me, is a really fun way to write. 

I was asked to do a songwriting class with Richard Thompson a few years ago. One of the things I realized, in trying to give some insight into songwriting from my point of view, is that I love listening to where people place things on beats. That is a huge part of the joy of it for me. There are some people who are laying all the way back, and then there are people that are on the 1. It’s fascinating to me, where different people feel it, and it’s inspiring to try that stuff on sometimes.

Speaking about drums makes me think of the Crown of Roses opener, “Back at the Start,” where you’re strumming a percussive rhythm that’s essentially a drum part.

Yeah. They tried to turn me down in the studio. I’m like, “No, no, no! [laughs] As bad as this is, I want it loud. We can’t make this nice or it’s not going to work.” 

I wrote that song and threw it away. I played it out right after I wrote it; I was reading the lyrics and I don’t see that well anymore, so it didn’t go very well. From performing it that first time, I didn’t realize I had anything that was worth keeping. But the feel of that song brought me back to it.

Are you still often using alternate tunings? 

Yes. My favorites are [open] G, dropped D, double dropped D, and DADDAD. DADDAD is my big one. I’m heavily dependent on DADDAD. It creates a beautiful drone. “Long Time” and “Ohio” are in DADDAD, and “Not Alone,” going back to the very first record. DADDAD can do a lot of different things. It can rock, it can drone, and it can be really big and very tiny.

Does a tuning like that lead to using more static harmony, as opposed to more chord movement?

Well, I have less to do with my hands and more to do with my voice, which is what I feel happier doing.

 “Long Time” has such a primal sound, on one chord the entire time. How did that song originate?

That came out of a picture in my head from a news story I saw from Gaza, actually, last fall, just seeing the shit that people are in and sometimes stay in for lifetimes—the kind of shit that for a lot of us is not really imaginable. 

The song started with that feeling, and it just didn’t want to be any more fancy than that [drone]. It wanted to be that one thing throughout, and it also wanted to be not timed in any particular way. It just wanted to be open to feeling your way through over the drone, rather than having any kind of time signature. That wasn’t fun for Robert [Plant]; when he was sent the track to sing on, he complained about it. But that’s just how it went.

“Long Time” sounds like an old blues or gospel song, and the lyrics fit that too: “the valley of despair,” “glory way.” You often tap into that sort of language. 

I love American Black gospel music, the old-timey stuff especially. That’s such a big source of everything for me.

Buddy Miller gave me these stacks of CDs before I made the [Downtown Church] record with him, and they all had about 100 songs. It was so deep having that. Every day I listened to something new. I can’t find the CDs anymore, which drives me nuts. I moved and they disappeared. 

Gospel is such a deep source of music in this country, and most [performers] are not well known to the vast majority of us. It’s kind of pure for that reason, too. I feel like no one’s trying to sell me anything. No one’s trying to be cool. They’re just trying to keep themselves going through music—and amen to that.

Along a different line is “All the Way Home,” which has beautiful flamenco-style guitar. What is your relationship to that music? 

Lately I’ve noticed that I think of flamenco singers and punk rock singers in the same worlds. I was really inspired by punk rock singers, even though I listened to mostly rhythm and blues and that kind of thing when I was growing up. I loved the punk rock stuff because it’s so direct. I mean, talk about folk music—you don’t have to be trained, and it’s just straight off of the chest. It’s direct, emotional stuff. I didn’t grow up with that around me, but I felt like I had it inside of me all the time. So that kind of expression is something I’m trying to learn.

How did you arrive at the story in “All the Way Home,” about the healer, the curandera?

I was in West Texas, and I’d gone out there to write. I was in an Airbnb next to a graveyard in an old Spanish town, and I started writing—making friends with the ghosts, really. It also was around the time where Roe v. Wade was getting crushed in the Supreme Court.

That character appeared out of nowhere. There is a story of how she lost her life. I don’t paint it too literally, but that’s the story. And within the song is [the feeling that] it’s just frustrating to be a woman right now. It always has been, but it’s particularly poignant right now. 

On that song and a few others, David Pulkingham played the guitar part. Why did you take that approach?

I really wanted that song to be Spanish guitar. I heard it from the get-go, like beyond my ability. By then, I’d been playing with David for maybe ten years. My voice went through some topsy-turvy stuff, and I learned to depend on his guitar playing and follow it a lot; just strength wise, it helped me get through the shows to have him play. 

That relationship affected the way I think about the music I can write. I’ve become a collaborator, so I can [imagine] a song and know that someone’s going to know how to play it. I don’t have to try to figure out how to do it well enough. So that’s fun for me. He’s an incredible player.

“Way Up to the Sky” is such an intimate solo performance, like sitting at your feet while you sing and play. Did the nature of the song lead you to record it that way?

I didn’t know what I was going to do with that song. I tried writing that song off and on for quite a few years and had completely different versions of it with bigger vocals and melody. My mom was dying when I wrote [the current version]. I was recording at that time, and I brought it to the studio and played it for Craig [Ross, the producer]. We had done all of our basics, so it was the last thing I gave to him. 

I felt like I didn’t know the song or how to do it. I went into the studio to make a demo for him to listen to and have at it. But he decided that was what we were going to keep—and I’m glad he did. He’s always been really good at getting me to pay attention to that sort of thing. 

You mentioned that you’ve gone through a lot of physical changes with your voice. Have you discovered new ways to sing and get melodies across? 

It’s a process, and there’ve been different phases of it for me. I have a little more strength than I used to have, but my voice is not completely set up the way it once was, because I just don’t think I can physically get my muscles to do those things anymore. Really, singers build a speaker in their body, and they keep building it their whole lives. I feel like my speaker got blown out muscularly, and the muscle memory didn’t even come back. 

So I’ve had to replace how I’m doing it, but there’s a whole lot of stuff that I can do now that I couldn’t do before. I’m learning how to use it. 

How long a period of adjustment are you talking about?

Well, before I got cancer, I got into a period of time where I was just getting respiratory illness after respiratory illness, because my immune system was shot. For the whole Servant of Love tour I was sick. I would say it’s been about ten years of working on it. 

It’s really been challenging, but in the last few years, it started to get more fun onstage. Now I’m really enjoying using my voice again.

Do changes in how you sing then affect how you write?

They definitely have for me. I’ve always loved the tiny voice—you know, when even a big voice is doing a tiny thing. I love that the best, like when Ella Fitzgerald is super tiny. It’s the most beautiful sound. 

What do you mean by tiny?

It’s super restrained and really close, almost like a whisper in your ear. 

For some reason, for most of my life, I really wanted a strong voice and to do all kinds of tricks with it. While I was good at that, it did occur to me a few times: Why am I working so hard? It’s like being a professional athlete. As you get older, the tricks get harder and harder to pull off, and they require so much maintenance—so much of your life has to go into living like an athlete that you get limited. I’m not one of these people that holds onto muscle, so I’ve got to always be working at whatever I’m doing. 

So anyway, it’s been a process, but it’s led me to a lot of different places. I actually listened to Leonard Cohen for the first time really carefully about five years ago, because I thought, well, I might as well get into the poetry thing [laughs]. I always tried to not be too flowery or intricate, because I wanted to have plenty of space for my voice to move on the notes. So I’ve tried out a lot of things as a result of not having the old stuff, and it’s been good.

Several times during this conversation, you’ve described a song as wanting to be a certain way. Do you think of songs as having an identity or essence that they want to become? 

I do feel that way. I mean, there are certain things that you know you’re not going to be able to finish, because you don’t know what you’re talking about yet. You can finish it and go play it for your friends, but you’re going to have wasted that melody on something subpar because you don’t know it yet. 

It’s like, I have lived my life through writing songs, and learned about my life in this world and discovered many, many things through writing songs. The songs make me work for that, because you know when it’s bullshit [laughs] pretty much every time.

So the process is about figuring out something that you don’t know yet.

I think it is. The songs show up in these little dribs and drabs, and sometimes they’re just like, if you work on this a little bit longer you’re going to find out what this is saying. 

Are there specific things you learned by writing and recording this latest batch of songs?

Well, it is kind of shocking to me that “Way Up to the Sky” works, because I really didn’t even know what melody I wanted to put into the song anymore. I’d had a melody for years and just finished the lyrics as they are now, and I had a [new] idea for a melody just before I got to the studio. We sang a bunch of other stuff, and I was trying to remember the idea that I had. I think I had to go listen to the voice memo. 

So the song had just arrived, and that is a cool moment to hear something. Craig, in particular, is always aware of those little moments when you’re not paying attention—that’s what he’s really interested in. I was coming out of some place where I was almost embarrassed to be singing the song because I didn’t know it. 

I feel like I learned a lot. If I heard somebody singing like that, I would go, wow. But for me, it took a lot to let go and just let that song be what it is.

What She Plays

Patty Griffin’s main guitar is a 1965 Gibson J-50. Since the ’90s she has played a CFox Sonoma concert model, given to her by luthier Charles Fox, that she keeps in DADDAD tuning. “He walked up to me at a gig in Nashville almost 30 years ago and handed me this guitar that he had made,” she recalls. “It changed my life. It’s become a huge part of my sound. It has an amazing across-the-board resonance.”

On her current tour she is playing a Pre-War parlor model, on loan from Jim Lauderdale, for songs in open-G tuning. 

For mandolin, she plays a 1912 Gibson O tuned ADAD. 

Her instruments are set up with D’Addario medium-gauge phosphor bronze strings (.013–.056 on the guitars and .011–.040 on mandolin). She uses Dunlop .73mm picks and Kyser capos. 

Griffin’s guitars all have L.R. Baggs Element pickups. Her pedalboard includes a Strymon El Capistan delay, Strymon blueSky reverb, and Boss TU-2 tuner. She uses four instrument channels into Neve RNDI preamps out to the front of house, and also to a Mackie mixer on which she can do her own submix to an amp. Her amps of choice are a Fishman Loudbox Artist and an SWR Workingman’s California Blonde. 

Her vocal mic is a Shure KSM11. She uses a Shure PSM 1000 wireless unit and JH Audio Layla in-ear monitors. 

Completing her equipment list, her manager adds, is a nice tea with lemon and raw honey. —JPR

This article originally appeared in the January/February 2026 issue of Acoustic Guitar magazine.