She's the boss

Dusty-evsky anyone? Okay, Patti Scialfa’s third solo album Play It As It Lays never quite plumbs the psychodramatic depths of The Idiot or Notes From Underground, but it does manage to fuse Dusty In Memphis soul with Plath-like confessionals.

Case in point: ‘Like Any Woman Would’, a song that evokes Al Green in the groove and The Bell Jar in the words. See also the closing brace of tunes, an unabashed love song entitled ‘Black Ladder’, and the whatever-will-be-will-be title-track.
“I like being very specific lyrically,” Scialfa says, cooped up in her hotel room on a sunny summer afternoon in Paris. “And I thought, ‘What’s the most frightening thing that can happen to women?’ And The Bell Jar is such a frightening book, and so I just thought to put that inside of an R&B song. Y’know, you couldn’t put that in a slow-tempo folk song, it would sound so maudlin. But at the same time it was very celebratory, the person singing the song is facing the problem instead of running away from it.”
So what led her to contemplate such murky territory?
“Well, I think all creative people have some connection with depression or a certain kind of darkness, and those to me are much more fascinating to look into than just plain happiness, which feels very one-dimensional and unreal in itself.”
Plus, as we get older and on closer terms with mortality, we realise our days are numbered.
“Well, you know who said that so beautifully was Paul Bowles in Sheltering Sky: You’re looking at a sunrise, but how many more sunrises will you really see in your life? Will it be five or ten or fifteen?’ It was quite beautiful.”
Once upon a time, age and death were taboo subjects for rock ‘n’ roll’s technicolour dreamers, but of late it’s been interesting to see people like Bob Dylan and Lou Reed stare down such concerns in their autumn years.
“Well, rock ‘n’ roll has allowed itself to age,” Patti says. “These people who started out at 20 are still writing in their 60s, and I think that’s fantastic, they’re writing right inside their skin. I’m 54, and on this record I wanted to explore the different complexities of having really long-term relationships. And then you want to sing your age, and that R&B feel really seemed to lend itself to that. If you think about women singing where they don’t have to infantilise themselves, like Aretha Franklin, ‘You Make Me Feel Like A Natural Woman’, or think of Etta James or Irma Thomas, they might have been very young, but they were singing like women. I found that very powerful, very inspiring. Little islands of dignity.”
Vivienne ‘Patti’ Scialfa was born in Deal, New Jersey in July 1953. Her parents were bootstrap entrepreneurs who managed to turn a single television store into a real estate development business. Patti, the middle child of the family and a teenager at the peak of the 60s revolution, betrayed little interest in pursuing anything other than a singing career. She studied music at NYU and supplemented gigs with waitressing jobs and busking sorties in Greenwich Village, and soon gained a reputation as a versatile session singer, guesting with acts like David Johansen and Southside Johnny and the Asbury Dukes. But her big break came in 1984 when Bruce Springsteen asked her to join the E-Street band on the eve of the massive Born In The USA tour, after mononucleosis rendered guitarist Nils Lofgren unable to sing back-up. By the Tunnel Of Love tour in 1988, Scialfa had begun an affair with Springsteen, who was in the process of splitting from his wife Julianne Phillips. The divorce was finalised in 1990; he and Scialfa were married a year later.
“I think my parents were happy when they saw that I started with the E Street Band,” Scialfa says, “just as they liked when I toured with Southside Johnny and they saw me do all my own music in the clubs. They were probably just worried in the way you worry about kids working so hard and not ending up having a family life or anything, but I was pretty headstrong and independent. Once I was out of college I wasn’t really that close to my parents and then I got closer again when I had the children.
“I’d already known Bruce before I was asked to do that tour. We were friends, and even though I lived in New York I would come down at the weekends and hang out at the same clubs because all the musicians knew each other, y’know, we’d go out for a hamburger or he’d give me a ride home from the club, so we already knew each other. My mother, I don’t think she’d met him then, but she’d say, ‘Who dropped you off?’ and I’d say, ‘Bruce,’ and she’d say, ‘Oh, that’s nice!’” (laughs).

Play It As It Lays is out now on Sony.