Patty Griffin is among the most consequential singer-songwriters of her generation, a quintessentially American artist whose wide-ranging canon incisively explores the intimate moments and universal emotions that bind us together.
Over two decades, the 2x GRAMMY® Award winner – and 7x nominee – and Americana Music Association Lifetime Achievement award winner, has crafted a remarkable body of work in progress that prompted the New York Times to hail her for “[writing] cameo-carved songs that create complete emotional portraits of specific people…[her] songs have independent lives that continue in your head when the music ends.”
2019 saw the acclaimed release of the renowned artist’s GRAMMY® Award-winning 10th studio recording, PATTY GRIFFIN. One of the most deeply personal recordings of Griffin’s remarkable two-decade career and first-ever eponymous LP, PATTY GRIFFIN made a top 5 debut on Billboard’s “Independent Albums” chart amidst unprecedented worldwide acclaim, and later, a prestigious GRAMMY® Award for “Best Folk Album.”
Griffin’s new album, CROWN OF ROSES, is a deeply personal and introspective work that explores themes of identity, nature, family, and womanhood. Emerging from a creative drought during the pandemic, Griffin found herself re-evaluating the stories she’d long told herself. The result is an eight-track collection that is both sparse and emotionally rich, blending folk, Americana, and blues. With CROWN OF ROSES, Griffin offers a record that’s both grounded and transcendent — one that invites listeners to release old narratives, embrace new truths, and stay truly alive while they’re here. Having crafted a rich catalog that chronicles love and death, heartache and joy, connection and detachment, Patty Griffin continues to push her art forward, as always imbuing every effort with compassion and craft, uncanny perception, and ever-increasing ingenuity.
Ben Goldsmith
Multidimensional artist Ben Goldsmith would like to tell you he “never could’ve imagined” this for himself, but he’s quick to note that – call it confidence or a preternatural headstrongness years in the making – it’d just not be true. “In a way, I’ve been working towards this since I was 3 or 4,” he says. “I’ve never strayed. It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.”
That “thing” Ben’s referring to is making music – more than music, it’s an art free from genre, with melodies as strong as some of the teen’s many influences. Ben was born and bred on acts like Aerosmith, Dave Mathews Band, Elton John, Queen, Stevie Wonder, John Mayer, and Bob Dylan. Ben floats between worlds, genres, and sounds, truly a jack and master of all trades.
Having released his debut album, The World Between My Ears, in 2023 – before he even graduated – Ben now turns the page on his next chapter. “For the first album, it was a more tight-knit circle approach which really worked at the time while I was still in high school,” Ben says. “However, as soon as I closed the door on the last season and opened the door to this new era, knew from the get-go that I needed to expand and take a drastically different approach.” In Nashville, Ben is working with songwriters the likes of Jon Green, Natalie Hemby, Alex Hope, Laura Veltz, Caitlyn Smith, Brad Tursi, and more. He has also been commuting back and forth to Los Angeles where he has spent consecutive days with Dan Wilson, Peter Fenn, Rick Nowels, Sean Douglas, and Casey Smith, to name a few.
The upcoming album will be released in September of 2024. The first release, “Love Again” will drop on May 3rd.
My goals are incredibly high for this next wave of music. There are so many different musical avenues to explore with the amazing writers and creatives I’ve been working with lately,” he says.
Named to The Hollywood Reporter’s “Emerging Artists 18 and Under [hollywoodreporter.com]” club for music this year and equipped with a natural yet extraordinary gift for singing, songwriting, and performing, Ben is blazing his own Converse-paved trail.
