Griffin Moyer— 5 August 2020 on Rocket Shop Radio Hour

Griffin Moyer joined host Tom Proctor on ‘Rocket Shop‘, Big Heavy World’s weekly local Vermont music radio hour on 105.9FM The Radiator.

On Wednesday, August 5, a surprise guest slipped into the Rocket Shop lineup. Griffin Moyer, friend of host Tom Proctor, brought his guitar and Jon Mayer swagger into the studio as a last minute guest to follow Exoerro. As surprising as his appearance was on its own, the real surprise was the quality of music coming from an artist with no recorded music, no social media presence, and less than a month’s experience performing live.

Before you judge Griffin as I did, as just another acoustic artist from Vermont here to sing about trees and birds and repeat platitudes about the spiritual essence of the sunrise over Mansfield, you need to hear his first song, “You Never Know.” I’m not sure if I’ve ever heard more meaningful metaphors stuffed into a song like a turducken. 

In it, Griffin’s narrator soliloquizes about the day they’ll leave this mortal coil, using lines like “the emptiness inside like a hospital hall” and “I wonder if God is a place: a chair and a guitar” to express his sentiments. They wish to be buried near a tree, because “I want something good to come from this I called me.” Sad, hopeful, and inventive, the song demonstrates everything I fell in love with about Griffin’s music.

The unfortunate thing, for the time being, is that this podcast represents all of his recorded music. It wasn’t until around the turn of 2019 to 2020 that he began to appreciate his own sound enough to approach open mics. Before then, he was playing covers for friends and family. Selfish, right? Keeping all of this talent to himself.

COVID’s been a thorn for most of the artists we’ve spoken to, but for Griffin it’s been both the thorn and the rose. While he had to put a stop to his short lived tour of open mics, he’s been afforded the opportunity to supplement his library of original music. “It’s given me a lot of space to think,” he says.

Options for producing music are available to Griffin. There’s an acquaintance in DC and a friend in Nashville, and other networked opportunities like that. But he’s not in a rush to chase those just yet. His first EP, he says, like everyone else’s first collection of music, will be garbage anyway. It’s a right of passage for every musician. At the moment he’d prefer to keep honing his sound, which he deprecates on almost every occasion.

As he mentioned near the start of the show, Griffin only recently learned to love his own songs. He was afraid to speak out or produce “back when my songs were bad. Not that they’re good now.”

Exposing and callousing these vulnerabilities is the next step for a green artist like Griffin. And unfortunately that’s hard to do without live performances. 

For the time being, we’ll content ourselves with “You Never Know,” “My Younger Days,” and “Overflow.” This podcast is the only place you’ll find Griffin at the moment, besides his inactive Instagram and Facebook accounts. But as COVID fades, so to will Griffin’s reclusiveness (we hope), so stay tuned for more!

Text by Luke Vidic.

Photo by James Lockridge.