"I think [music] is just something I was born with. I think I came out this way, ready to sing," says Patty Griffin, owner of the astonishing, bluesy voice that graces Living with Ghosts. She says one of her earliest memories is "Singing along to an Ella Fitzgerald song called "Catfish," and pretending I could sing with her and thinking about how cool that felt."
Griffin belts out the 10 songs on her record as though her life depended on it. Since its May 1996 release, Griffin's been on the road, slowly earning a reputation as a prolific and unique singer, songwriter and guitarist. When she spoke to me from a stop in Colorado, she was between appearances opening for Johnny Cash at the Telluride Bluegrass Festival and for Emmylou Harris at the House of Blues in Los Angeles. She's also opened for Shawn Colvin, but these pairings only begin to suggest Griffin's sound.
"I've talked to your straight folk magazines, I've talked to skateboard punk magazines, because [my music] is really open to interpretation," Griffin says. "I feel like what I do is really emotion-driven and anyone can relate to that." Ghosts is indeed an emotionally-charged album, from the opening lines of "Moses" -- "Diamonds! Roses!/I need Moses/To cross this sea of loneliness/Part this red river of pain" -- to the tender closing refrains of "Not Alone."
At first listen Ghosts may be difficult to distinguish from the legions of girl-with-guitar acts currently flooding the airwaves. But soon Griffin's gripping, naked lyrics and pared-down guitar styles take hold, conveying a rare wisdom and conviction. The paths Griffin had to walk in order to arrive at the release of Ghosts have everything to do with her distinctiveness.
Growing up among six siblings was the first step. "I used to run home from school and get in my closet and sing at the top of my lungs," she explains. "I need to be loud. I'm not a large person." In addition, the women in her family were singers, passing the habit down from generation to generation. "[My mom] was the housecleaning singer. We always sang together. When I was really little she used to take me walking in the woods and there'd be bird sounds and she'd sing the bird sounds back to me. She was always making noise."
Griffin married out of her Irish Catholic family at an early age, wedding a man who had little understanding of her need to sing. "It drove him a little crazy," she remembers. "He would just go, 'please be quiet!'" For other reasons the marriage split, and during this turbulent period Griffin moved to Boston. She found herself writing songs, taking voice training and performing in clubs around town.
Some of that material became the foundation for Ghosts, a starkly honest album which features a solo Griffin on guitar and vocals. She made a simple demo to pitch her songs to record companies, eventually inking a deal with A&M records to record her songs with a band. "I really lacked experience in the studio working with other musicians," she says. "I took a month of my life and put so much work into it that when I finished it I felt like this was my record. When A&M got it they were really unhappy with it. I [had] spent a lot of time worrying about playing in time with the band and less thinking about letting myself feel the performances."
The recordings were scrapped, but Griffin didn't give up. She asked the label "if I could release just the guitar/voice record since they liked it so much. And they were okay with that." Although Griffin liked the approach, "It felt really scary. If a critic hits you -- thinks it sucks -- they're saying you suck."
Despite Griffin's fears, she's produced a breathtaking, immediate album. Tracks include the wrenching "Moses," singles like the letting-go ballad "Let Him Fly" and the bluesy "Every Little Bit," whose embittered lyrics cut to the quick of one-night stands: "It's funny how a morning turns a love to shame/Disguised and disfigured and you thought I tasted like rain," she moans ironically. Other songs, like "Forgiveness" and the elegiac "Not Alone" are more optimistic.
Ghosts' most startling song is "Poor Man's House," a chronicle of life on the far edge of poverty where "You know you've done enough when every bone is sore/You know you've prayed enough when you don't ask any more." Even though Griffin's parents weren't wealthy, she explains the song was written about her ancestors. "I was living in Jamaica Plain in Boston, which is where my Irish grandparents lived. That was the first time I lived on my own and I was figuring out what I wanted to do. I walked a lot of the same ground that my grandparents did," she says. "['House' is] really more about the essence I think my grandfather James left, the legacy he left for my family through the sad parts of his life."
Griffin's inspiration seems to come from everywhere. While she worked on Ghosts she was listening to "the Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, Terence Trent D'Arby," she remembers. "As well as Nirvana and Pearl Jam... that was just pervasive at the time on the airwaves. It just kind of comes into your body and you take it on. I find some music that I can get a lot of life out of and a lot of feeling out of and I think it feeds into what I do. There's just so many people out there with a lot to say, like Patty Smith, Bruce Springsteen and John Lennon."
In addition, her Catholic upbringing reared its head in songs like "Moses" and "Forgiveness," weaving through other songs as well. "It's been years since I was a Catholic, really. But I keep coming up with the Biblical things, all the time, even now in my writing. It's like a part of my vocabulary, and it's so deeply ingrained. The positive thing Catholicism gave me is a line on mystery. Things that are beyond immediate sight."
When she was recording Ghosts, Griffin says, she recorded on "a really shitty Takamini. I don't even know the model number. It was before I was really into guitars," she relates with a laugh. Now, she says, "I'm a big fan of Gibson guitars. I have a very reliable Taylor D17 that is a pretty sturdy road guitar. But my real favorite guitar is a 1965 J50 Gibson. A really beautiful guitar. It's got a lot of life in it."
Despite her subject matter and her spare, chiming guitar style, Griffin bristles at the blues/folk label critics slap on her. "I've never specialized and I don't like being pinned down to any one thing in my life," she says. "One of the things that I'm really struggling to do is to not be thrown into the 'pretty folk girl' category. When I say that out loud I just feel a noose going around my neck. It's hard when you're female. It's almost like you have to be abruptly macho with people to get your strength across as opposed to a specific female type of strength.
"I think it's kind of a new thing for our culture to be dealing with -- strong females expressing themselves musically. We've had a lot of people do it, like Patty Smith... but it's tough. You have to make your own way. You can't really listen to what people are saying about you.," she continues.
Griffin says her next challenge is planning the next record. Although she has a number of songs in the works, "I'm now working hard on making a transition to working with other musicians because there are limitless possibilities when you do that." She's aiming for studio time in the fall in the hopes of releasing her sophomore work by early 1998.
When I ask her what she's most proud of, Griffin stops to think. "I'm pleased with myself for having perservered through many many years. I'm 33 years old and I'm just starting to get on the road. I went through a lot of years of people patting me on the head and telling me, 'Oh my god, poor Patty, she thinks she can do this, let's just humor her along here,'" she remembers with a laugh.
"I read this interview with Lisa Germano -- who I've never met, I've only seen her play -- and I love her stuff," Griffin relates. "She was saying something like, 'I know that I may never achieve mass popularity but there's a small amount of people out there who really love my music and that's important enough.' That's sort of how I feel about it. I don't know, we'll see."
This article was originally published in ROCKRGRL magazine.