It’s customary to describe Patty Griffin as one of the great singer-songwriters of the Americana scene, but this bravely experimental new set shows her expanding her range even further, adding touches of jazz and echoes of north Africa. It’s an album dominated by songs of love and loss, in which the musical settings constantly change. She starts with a drifting mood piece backed by piano and trumpet, then switches from introspection to a furious climax, before moving on to an edgy bar-room stomp and the powerful, quietly angry Good and Gone, the story of a police shooting treated with a bluesy/Arabic edge perhaps influenced by her time working with Robert Plant’s Band of Joy. Then there’s the moody and mysterious Everything’s Changed, finely sung over a repeated riff, and a pained and personal ballad, You Never Asked Me, which already sounds like a standard.
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