The Sons Also Rise
Ken Griffin: Skinnied out, reborn in Brooklyn, now coming home with Favourite Sons.
Peter Murphy, 01 Jun 2011
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.”
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