I definitely consider my music to be folk music, when I think about it.
Its folk music but it’s just dressed in different clothes.
Obviously, there’s a story being told in a lot of those things.
A lot of times they’re just snapshots of moments
things out of everyday life
so that you get an idea of how things were or how things looked through someone else’s eyes back then.
The connection I feel to that is that
that’s what I try and do in my music, not necessarily try and do but that’s just what happens in my music.
My name is John Grant.
I’m here at the Folk Art exhibit at Tate Britain
and I’m performing a song I wrote called 'It Doesn’t Matter to Him'.
If I think about it
I am successful as it were, I get to sing for lovely people all over this lovely world
and I am no way near as awkward as I was when I was younger
I guess I’m one of those guys who get better looking as they age
and even though I have felt beaten down by constant doubt
Depression and confusion brought about by people’s actions, death and tax forms.
I keep getting up and I am loved by all my friends and family.
I know there have been lots of raised eyebrows and concerned glances lately.
It doesn’t matter to him.
I could be anything but I could never win his heart again.
It doesn’t matter to him.
He took away my Triple-A pass.
I am invisible to him.
I chose the song because I thought it fit with the theme of an individual expressing a snapshot in time.
In this particular example, the end of a passionate relationship, you know
which almost everybody has to deal with at some point.
And now I feel the soft pink flesh of my heart hardening
to the countless possibilities contained within each day.
Vulnerability feels like a cold wet concrete room lit with fluorescent lighting
Which as you know makes everything look bad.
I still keep trying to figure out how I became irrelevant
How I got myself evicted from his heart from one day to the next.
And the worst part is that even if I got an answer right now
it would not change anything because we have become two strangers.
It doesn’t matter to him.
I could be anything but I could never win his heart again.
It doesn’t matter to him.
He took away my Triple-A pass.
I am invisible to him.
It doesn’t matter to him.
I could be anything but I could never win his heart again.
It doesn’t matter to him.
He took away my Triple-A pass.
I am invisible to him.
We’re interested in history and what people were like and what they did.
I think it helps with perspective when you are reminded
that people have always been expressing similar things.
It’s not like the people from the 1700s, the 1800s or the 1600s had access to different emotions.
I suppose that’s what I take out of it or what I imagine when I think about folk art.
I’ve done these things so that, it obviously served some sort of function for me
and I think it’s a way for me to feel like I’ve been heard
and nobody can really say yes or no.
You know, it just is.