The Sons Also Rise

Half a lifetime in Brooklyn, and Ken Griffin’s still referred to as ex-Rollerskate Skinny. Favourite Sons’ second album The Great Deal of Love should put paid to that. Years of bartending, people-watching and soaking up the nightlife, low-life and half-life of New York City gave the now 40-year-old musician the kind of insights that can best be articulated in a conventional song structure. And if the new album will be born into a post-music industry world, well, Griffin isn’t fazed.

“We started to talk to some record companies and I remembered how soul-destroying that stuff is, so we put some feelers out and decided we wanted to release it here first,” he says on a fine morning in Brook’s hotel in Dublin, still jet-lagged after a transatlantic flight. “I really don’t know what a record does (now) only advertise you as a band. Which I love. But any idea of it being an economic situation is just gone. In my experience with Rollerskate Skinny, in terms of money, we caught the last wave. We were able to live week to week and pay our rent. I don’t know how young bands do it now.”
Favourite Sons are not a young man’s band. Songs like ‘Safe For All Seasons’, ‘Sweet Upon the Vine’ and ‘Twilight Man’ betray echoes of Scott Walker, Lee Hazlewood, Frank Sinatra and Van Morrison among others.
“I had always worked against the song form,” Griffin admits, “and at one point I thought to myself, ‘Why do I work against this form when it’s actually something from my childhood that gave me comfort, gave me hope, gave me an idea that I could function in the world? The actual structure of it, the limitations if you will, were comforting. I think it was just rebellion to tear apart something I loved, and that’s what I did with Skinny. But then three years ago I started playing acoustic guitar into a dictaphone and listening back, and I was so satisfied with the experience. There’s a lot of people in experimental or alternative music who assume that writing a song is really easy, and I was one of those people, and then I tried to do it and then I found that not only is it not easy, it’s elusive.”
Who does he consider masters of the form?
“Leonard Cohen, Lee Hazlewood – their effortless structure, the work, the craft in it... I’m obsessed with it. I have to be able to strum the songs on my little kids’-size nylon string guitar. I don’t go outside the first four frets. I’d like the song to be so that the most rudimentary musician could play it and it would still have its core strength. That’s why we do radio sessions sometimes, it’s just me strumming G to E with a song over it. It’s scary, man.”
Far scarier, he reckons, than indulging in Sonic Youth or MBV holocaust assaults. Youthful expression though white noise, Griffin admits, was as much a physical experience as an aesthetic choice.
“It’s a rite of passage. We did that to such extremes in bands I was in, standing on six distortion pedals, but there was always this sense of trying to create something beautiful in there. But with a song, the words have to be musical. Sometimes a line might have depth on the page, but music mocks it.
“Immediacy is not a dirty word in songwriting. Of all the Dylan songs that I love, I tended to like them straight away and then find their secondary, tertiary depths. A song like ‘Sweet Upon the Vine’... I just had that phrase and kept it for a while and then I found the melody. The fishing metaphor is a tired metaphor but it just works so well. You just have to be by a river, and most of the time you’re catching nothing. But I have to have the guitar in my hand four or five hours a day. The more I’m strumming the guitar, the more songs I write. Right now I’ve got over 80 unrecorded songs. Once I found that part of the river where the fish are, I’m working it hard.
“Someone said you don’t catch many songs downriver from Bob Dylan, but at 40 I’m going through what mostly young people get. It’s a totally new thing. Kris Kristofferson didn’t write a song ‘til he was 33 or something. ‘Me And Bobby McGee’ was the first song he wrote. Bill Withers didn’t play guitar until he was in his 30s. You feel almost embarrassed to fight your case as a 40-year-old, but at the same time you can finally sing about things you’ve actually experienced. It’s not imaginary. You’re reacting to things that are coming up in your bloodstream.”

The Great Deal of Love is out now on Low Rent Recordings.