Patty Larkin
Embracing the Edge
by Kerry Dexter

"When I think about it, I was writing these songs [for Regrooving the Dream, her latest release on Vanguard] at the end of the last century," singer/songwriter Patty Larkin reflected. "I think there was a lot of nostalgia about what was going on around me at that time, and maybe what types of music were being played around me."For her ninth solo album, Larkin explores the lives of characters caught up in change, both spiritual and physical, and investigates the possibilities of sound, adding loops, samples, and sonic texture to her masterful acoustic guitar skills. "These are more story-songs than I've done in recent memory," she said, "really written in the styles of American music that I love and that are near and dear to me. So they run from traditional and country ballads — ballads meaning story songs I suppose — to more modern stuff. 'Trip-hop,' someone has even called 'Anyway the Main Thing Is.' Some of it is more like what I've done before in terms of being a singer/songwriter, like the song 'Beg to Differ,' while other pieces have samba, Brazilian, and Celtic influences.

"I didn't really try to edit myself writing-wise on this one," she continued. "Just let the songs come out. The first one I wrote was 'Hotel Monte Vista,' which is a traditional Appalachian ballad that I wrote on electric guitar. One of the people that I most admire in this business is Richard Thompson, and I figure if he's done it then I can do it — that's my permission on that. But when I got done with it I thought, 'What the heck am I doing?' This is gonna be my new batch of songs for a new label and a new album, and here I am with this 10-minute mountain ballad on electric guitar. But things worked out; it all worked out okay."

That blend of creativity and optimism have stood Larkin in good stead from the days she first began teaching herself guitar while she was growing up in Wisconsin. Her parents had started her on classical piano lessons (which she thanks them for in the liner notes of Regrooving the Dream), but it was acoustic guitar that held her interest. "It was me, my friends, my sisters, all playing. It was one of those things where you just want to keep learning," she said, "where the D chord is like the biggest discovery of your life that week, everything you play has the D chord in it because you've just had C, F, and G down. I was about 11 or 12; I think I was in the sixth grade. I probably learned folk songs for about a year, and then I started writing."

She was listening to the songs of Tom Paxton, Bob Dylan, and Paul Simon, as well as pop music on the radio, but it wasn't any one of these influences that drew her to write.

"I wanted to learn more songs," she said. "I really had no idea why I was writing, other than I thought it was a fun thing to do, and I wanted to know more songs. If I had been hanging with people who knew tons of songs, maybe I never would have started writing my own. That sure would have changed my life!"

By the time she got to college, Larkin was thinking about what courses to choose. "Right after my freshman year in college I hadn't decided what I wanted to study really, and I talked to a friend of mine who's now an actor. She said, 'Well, what do you want to do?' and I said, 'I wanna play music.' So she said, 'Why don't you go over to the music department then and talk to them about that?' I did," Larkin said, "and I got — Mister Bummer, music instructor, Mister Uninspiring, Mister nothing-you-can-do, in fact I'm-gonna-laugh-at-your-dream-here guy. It was kind of a chuckle laugh," she recounted, "but he really didn't take me seriously at all. Said, 'No, we don't teach guitar here,' didn't make any other suggestions. It was a small college in the midwest — but a good one — and he didn't even ask me any questions about what I wanted to do. He didn't have a big view of what music was, and really, he should have known better. I think a lot of people have stories like that."

This is an excerpt from issue #92.