For Patty Griffin, the expression “going solo” reverberates with many meanings. The youngest of seven children, she also married young. It wasn’t until a difficult divorce that she realized she had never done anything for herself. And it wasn’t until she started to sing that she realized she had never really expressed herself.
“Emotions like anger were not in my vocabulary,” the singer-guitarist says. “They were not welcome.” Mindful of her place in the family hierarchy, she consigned herself to being overruled. And since she didn’t have the authority to speak out, she learned to keep her feelings to herself. Similarly, she sublimated her feelings in her marriage, a tendency that became increasingly debilitating as the relationship fell apart.
Throughout it all, she lost herself in music, turning to the passionate and personal songs of Bruce Springsteen and Rickie Lee Jones, among others. She heard how they expressed what she couldn’t say herself. At age 16, she acquired a guitar, but strumming it was largely a private joy. She wrote poetry and sometimes she worked at putting her words to music—but these were things she didn’t share with other people.
Years later, single and working as a waitress in Boston, Griffin discovered how liberating freedom could be. Forced to consider her future, she realized that her driving joy had become songwriting and playing guitar. “Writing definitely helped me to heal,” she says. “Holding all that stuff in started to make life very difficult.”
Slowly, Griffin began to consider performing. “I’m a very shy person,” she says in a gentle, soft voice that barely makes it across long-distance lines. “I wasn’t brave enough to audition for bands, so I ended up doing it solo. But it was a real struggle to get relaxed onstage. It didn’t really happen until a couple years ago. I was making these big strides in my life, and all of a sudden everything started happening at once. Performing was a part of that. It was part of the whole freedom of learning to take control of yourself and to do the things you want.”
The irony came with what Griffin offered people—this shy, petite, delicate redhead with a big, loud voice starting laying out her life with anger and passion and unbridled joy. “Diamonds! Roses! I need Moses to cross this sea of loneliness, part this red river of pain,” she sings in “Moses,” the opening cut of Living With Ghosts, her debut album on A&M Records. “I don’t necessarily buy any key to the future or happiness, but I need a little place in the sun sometimes, or I think I will die.”
Griffin found that little place in the sun underneath the harsh glow of stage lights in small Boston-area clubs. Here she was, the polite youngest child, the meek and subservient ex-wife, onstage baring her most private feelings to strangers. “Until then, I had a real reluctance to confront anything,” she says. “When I started performing, it was my first experience at letting emotions flow. I started expressing things that I’d never been able to show. It helped me in everyday life. Now I feel like everything in my life had sort of shoved me into being honest about myself. My biggest fear for my whole life was people finding out who I am. Yet now, here I am, saying these things in songs that I could never have said.”
People in the audience were amazed at the strength of her voice, at how forceful she sounded, at how hard and furious she could bang on her guitar. “When people first hear me, they’re a little shocked,” she says with a laugh. “I’m not a huge person, but I can get loud.” Indeed, on some songs, Griffin lets it fly, pouring herself into the words with cathartic release; others are as gentle and delicate as she is. All feature just her voice and her guitar, the only way she’s ever presented her songs.
Anger is definitely a part of her vocabulary now. On “Every Little Bit,” she lets the turbulence of her emotions build until they rupture. “I spit, I spit in the eye,” she sings. “I tear, I tear out my heart and I scatter the bits. I stay unseen by the light, I stay untold by the truth, I’m sold by a lie. By this I am able in all of my travels to make these memories quit, but tonight I clearly recall every little bit.” Set to hard-strummed, blues-tinged chords, her voice drops in register before building to a climax: “I can chew like a cannibal, I can yell like a cat. I even had you believing I really, really like it like that. But there was never a moment, not a moment, now you know, now you know, you ever got within a hundred million miles of my soul.”
Other songs confront difficulties with a more tender touch. On the wistful and quietly melodic “Let Him Fly,” Griffin’s voice is sweet and supple in a style reminiscent of Phoebe Snow. In the joyous “Mad Mission,” she speaks of her unending search for love, while “You Are Not Alone” is a generous, forgiving tune packed with empathy and compassion. But listeners will likely walk away remembering the direct anger of “You Never Get What You Want” or the severe imagery of “Sweet Lorraine,” the one song in which Griffin creates a fictional character to tell a troublesome story. “Her father would tear out like a page of a bible, and he’d burn down the house to announce his arrival,” she sings. With a violent father and an absentee mother, Sweet Lorraine creates her own life, focusing on the allure of art and magic rather than the bitterness and harshness that surround her. “Her daddy called her a slut and a whore on the night before her wedding day,” Griffin sings. “The very next morning, well, her daddy gave Lorraine away.”
After she began performing around Boston, Griffin quickly developed a local following. As her reputation grew, she tried expanding her songs. Her initial experiences with producers and studio musicians didn’t work out too well, though. “I’d never really worked a lot with musicians,” she says. “When we tried, it was hard for me to express myself to the producer. My lack of experience and my insecurity made it hard.”
When Griffin recorded Living With Ghosts, she left the studio and the musicians and the producer behind to do a solo acoustic album. She captured several of the songs in the Nashville kitchen of her manager, Michael Baker. The others were done in a Boston apartment, where she played and sang in a closet. “It represents what I’ve been doing for the last few years,” she says of the record. “It’s kind of scary to put it out this way. If someone wants to pan it, they’re panning me. But it’s what I do, so I’m real happy we were able to do it.”
