Patty Griffin's Personal Best

BEST FIT: Last time we spoke, you mentioned how Tom Waits has been a huge inspiration for you, particularly in the way he wrote about the lives of poor people and gave them a certain dignity in his songs. That’s something you’ve also done a lot in your career, with “Poor Man’s House” from your debut album being a great example. What makes this song such an important one to you in your catalogue?

PATTY GRIFFIN: It's really personal. When I wrote it, I was living about a mile away from where my Irish grandparents had been servants on a big estate in Boston and I was really haunted by that when I lived there. Their background really influenced me. They came from Ireland, where people were starving and in a very desperate situation, and they had such brains and spirit. They were big readers, intelligent, but they had to sort of flatten themselves out to work servant jobs. They were working for the benefit of future generations, with little pleasure for themselves, and I think that I can relate to those feelings. It’s all for someone else’s kid, and your job is to sort of muddle through.

I think that’s one of the reasons why I live in Texas, so close to Mexico. There’s a large community of Mexican immigrants here, and I feel like I can relate in some way to the experience of sacrificing your own comfort. It’s all for someone else’s kid and your job is to sort of muddle through and to not ask for anything for yourself. Generations go by like that. It’s probably always been that way, somewhere in the world, where people are just so deeply in the shit that they are forced to stay there for a long, long time. I think the Irish spent a lot of time being in the shit, and those desolate feelings followed them to America. Growing up, I realised those feelings were in me too. I was always trying to make myself very small and be of service. Don’t get me wrong, I like being of service and I don’t mind being small. I just don’t want to feel like it’s all there is, or that it has to be that way.

My grandparents had passed away by the time I moved to that place in Boston, but my father had grown up there and I was feeling all this weight that he was still carrying around from his upbringing. It can take generations and generations to work yourself out of extreme poverty, out of tragedy, and it’s exhausting. It probably changes the DNA in your body after a time, you know?

Before making Living with Ghosts, you spent some years waiting tables and experiencing firsthand the appalling attitudes that some people have towards people of a working-class background. Were you drawing on that as well, when writing this song?

I think, for the first time in my life, I was thinking about where my expectations had been set and about my ideas of what my life could be. I knew I really wanted to pursue music but there was also this thing, this voice in me that was really resistant to the idea, telling me to I had to be realistic. But then I thought, well, other people are doing it and making it work, why is it not something that I can do too? All that was going on inside of me, and I came to realise it was a gift from the past. And it really is a gift, as an artist, to have a point of view like that, because I think it’s a universal story. We’re really up against that story right now, the haves and the have nots.

I was thinking about that, listening back to this song. Particularly the line “nothing is louder to God’s ears than a poor man’s sorrow,” because it feels so painfully and criminally at odds with what the so-called Christian right are doing in the US right now. They’re some of the loudest voices supporting the terrorising of undocumented immigrants, being kidnapped into vans off the streets. So I think “Poor Man’s House” continues to be relevant in different ways.

I think I go forth in it too. Actually, what happened with the Irish is a really good example of the disease of the spirit in America. After a generation or two they were able to pass as regular white people in society, and many of the horrifically inhuman politicians we have in this country come from those families who were once outcasts. So many of them have Irish last names and it makes me feel so sick to my stomach because I know where their ancestors came from, and most of them came out of some kind of dire situation.

It's really so crushing, but I think it also explains a lot of why these attitudes are so prevalent. My theory is that these people are just so afraid of being seen as having come from that sort of background. There’s a caste system here in America that is barely recognised, and it’s all based on economics. People are afraid to be seen as having any association with poverty, because if you are seen in that light – and the English know this very well – you’re much more vulnerable in society. Within all this right-wing Christian crap is this very misguided idea that it’s somehow going to protect them from any kind of trouble or agony, and it couldn’t be more opposite, you know? It creates this whole other thing.

I love the harsh strumming that you end the song with. It feels powerful, as if it holds all the frustration and pain that you are singing about. How was it in the early days when you started playing this song out? What was the reaction?

People related to it – and it's not a literal kind of song, so that was interesting. I made fans with this song that I don't think would necessarily have paid attention to anything else I've done, before or since. I've gotten letters from people about this specific song, so there’s something about it that people respond to. For me, there’s just something that feels really true about this song when I sing it, so I’m really happy that it resonates with others too.

Going back to what you said about it not being a literal kind of song, I don't think I'd ever heard someone sing about poverty in such a way. You’re coming from these different angles that are really interesting. On one hand really humanising the people whose lives are so hard, and on the other using this almost mocking tone that flips the script.

That’s the voice inside you that says you can’t have a better life, that your life’s plan is defined by a poverty you’ll never break out of. But the song is also about all of us, you know? – “Everybody we’re living in a poor man’s house” – it’s like we are all vulnerable. That’s not something I was thinking about when I wrote the song. I wasn’t thinking ‘Oh, we are all going to be vulnerable one day,’ but now I feel like that’s true.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Living with Ghosts. Are there any plans for a first-time vinyl release?

I don't know who has the masters even. Universal had everything and then they had that big warehouse fire, so I don't know.

Sheryl Crow thought for a long time that she’d lost her early albums in the fire and it eventually turned out that she didn't, so you never know.

Well, it's amazing for them to not have to find things they don't really want to find, right? We had a fight. It's a shitshow. I’ll say no more. I don't even want to know if they're around or not.