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Patty Griffin, Servant of Love, feature CD, 10/16

Patty Griffin has released Servant Of Love,  the Grammy Award winning singer-songwriter’s tenth album. 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.  Servant of Love creates 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.

Tune-in, Friday October, 16 at 12 noon to hear Servant of Love in its entirety on KSUT. 

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