The title track opens Patty Griffin’s 10th album with a defiant dare – have you, it seems to say, the stomach for this mysterious and intense journey? A lone, elegiac piano wanders into space. Then Griffin’s voice, slow, saturnine, immersed, leans into the song: “I long to live, I long to live by the ocean/Carry me away, I’m a servant of love.”
It is a remarkable song and a remarkable performance. Griffin’s voice rises and falls, the piano trades notes with a lone muted trumpet, before she reaches a crescendo on the repeated line “words from the deep tell it to me”.
A label press release suggests that Griffin was mining the “transcendentalism of writers like Emerson and Whitman” while digging deep into the American folk and roots tradition, and that there were two mysteries at work: the love that underpins our human emotions and the “symmetry in nature that we don’t understand”.
All this is true to some degree. What it didn’t state was that the American singer-songwriter (51) was also working herself through the painful fallout of her breakup with British rock legend Robert Plant.
There are obvious references, such as the slow-burning, blistered-guitar-laced wounded woman blues of Hurt a Little While and the more plaintive You Never Asked Me, a piano ballad that bends the hardest heart. Clues can also be found in the late-night jazz of Noble Ground ("there ain't no one without blame"), the beautiful sadness of Rider of Days, and the spectral Everything's Changed.
However, Servant of Love is an album of recovery and strength rather than anger and despair. It is also about the search for meaning in ourselves and the world around us. Griffin's singing and her timing are breathtaking; every word, every note matters as she slips naturally from folk to jazz, from blues to ballads.
The vibrant playing and producer Craig Ross's imaginative settings are also key. Though some songs resist easy understanding, Servant of Love overall will go down as one of the most challenging and rewarding albums you'll hear this year.
