“Here is the thing / That I’ve known from the start,” sings Patty Griffin on “Back at the Start,” the simmering opening track of her new record Crown of Roses. “You might lose everything / Spend years in the dark but / It isn't the end / We're just back at the start.” This nugget of wisdom is one of many Griffin imparts in her cool, smoky tone, meditating on the notion that as women age, they become invisible. For some, it’s something to buck against, but in Griffin’s magnificent grasp, maybe it’s something to embrace.
Maybe invisibility offers the chance for risk-taking, redefining oneself, getting weirder, going deeper. The pandemic years wrought plenty of time for looking inward and reflecting on time gone by, and for Griffin, reckoning with a complicated matriarch, internalized misogyny, and the artistic depths she had yet to plunge even with a decades-long career in the rearview.
