Patty Larkin's new album goes back and forth between overcast imagery and bright moments captured in quick riffs. From the moodiness and the delightful moments comes what will be an underappreciated album. However, it shouldn't be. Patty Larkin has put together an album of two faces, one displaying a frown and the other a smile. The Daily Cardinal recently spoke with Larkin about influences and the way mainstream embraces folk music.
Your music has been described with a series of intersections, including \Beth Orton intersects Guy Clark."" Which combination do you feel is most accurate?
Probably somewhere in the Richard Thompson/Beth Orton category. And then kind of flirting with modern recording techniques like loops and samples. My music is a reflection of what I listen to.
Are you comfortable with comparisons to other artists, like to Bonnie Raitt and Beth Orton?
Yes. Singer-songwriters have kind of branched off into their own styles and my writing is acoustic-based. It's just a little harder to get a handle on it and find a genre that you can say is the style of music I do.
What were your years in Milwaukee like?
It was great. It's a wonderful town to grow up in. There's more space than a lot of cities. I moved from the west side to the east side. It was the '60s so there was a lot of great music. People were folk music and pop music and rock music. I learned how to play from friends and my sister and just sort of jumped in on the guitar.
And then you moved to Boston and Cape Cod?
Yeah, then I went to college. I went to a small school in Indiana and then I transferred to the University of Oregon where I graduated. The University of Wisconsin-Madison was too radical. Then I moved to Boston and I studied music at the Berklee College of Music. I started teaching guitar and playing out.
How did the Boston scene treat you?
It was really great for me because I was able to study jazz and voice for three or four years. It was at a time when acoustic music was kind of going underground and later it surfaced with Suzanne Vega, Tracy Chapman and Shawn Colvin and people like that. It was actually easier to get in on the scene here. Now there's so many singer songwriters in the Boston area that it's become a mecca for them. I've been told that it's very competitive, just getting a foothold and getting a gig. And I've been very fortunate that I've been able to get in on the ground level.
Do you think of yourself as part of a new folk emergence?
I think that people continue to respond to acoustic music and folk music and music outside of the mainstream. I don't think the mainstream will embrace folk music en masse like it did in the '60s.
I don't think that's ever going to happen again. Individual artists will surface. It's out there, it's just not on MTV.
