Happy 25th Anniversary to Patty Griffin’s debut album Living With Ghosts, originally released May 21, 1996.
Instead of Living With Ghosts, singer-songwriter Patty Griffin could have easily named her 1996 full-length debut Nowhere To Hide. It’s a powerful album of ten songs, each featuring only Griffin supported by acoustic guitar—thus resembling the nakedness of copyright demos. It was definitely a risky move for Griffin’s first major label release.
Did it pay off? Well, that depends upon whom you’re asking.
Living With Ghosts never charted in Billboard, to date it’s sold less than 250,000 copies, and it didn’t exactly set up her sophomore effort (1998’s Flaming Red) for commercial success—that album also never found a home on the Billboard 200 and actually sold less than its predecessor.
Over the years, though, Griffin has established herself as one of the most critically acclaimed singer-songwriters in music today with a rich catalog of studio albums, a lengthy list of tour itineraries, and seven GRAMMY nominations resulting in two wins for her 2010 gospel album Downtown Church and her 2019 self-titled folk album. Griffin’s been covered by The Chicks, Miranda Lambert, Emmylou Harris and Reba McEntire. Kelly Clarkson absolutely fangirls over her.
I couldn’t care less about the lack of chart position or sales number of Living With Ghosts, to be honest. Twenty-five years after its release, I still hold this watershed album in as high regard as Joni Mitchell’s Blue (1971) and Carole King’s Tapestry (1971). This is an album that, by the very nature of its sparse recording, demands two-way engagement as if the spotlight is firmly on Griffin and you’re the only one in the audience.
It also requires an ability to empathize—to slip into the well-worn shoes of every protagonist Griffin writes about who’s rolling with life’s high tides. It commands the listener to focus squarely on the small amounts of real estate where Griffin discloses big revelations about each character she painstakingly cares for within each song.
Although it’s usually categorized as a seminal folk or alt-country effort due to its stripped-down sound, I’ve always felt Living With Ghosts moonlights as a bona fide rock album whose bare bones recording, muscular guitar playing, and deeply drawn incisive lyric moments challenge the perceived notions of what a rock album can be.
There’s a fiery demeanor and bristling urgency that Griffin weaves throughout Living With Ghosts. When “Moses” breaks the seal at the beginning of the album with Griffin’s pained call out heavenward for a savior (“Diamonds, roses, I need Moses / To cross this sea of loneliness / Part this red river of pain”), it’s shocking, at first listen, how freely and unabashedly Griffin erupts her anger and anguish in front of us.
In “Every Little Bit,” she feverishly sketches a portrait of a rebellious woman proud of her emotional armor (“I can chew like a cannibal / I can yell like a cat / I even had you believing that I really really like it like that”) which ends with Griffin wailing out the word “bit” several times, unraveling it into a multitude of newly formed syllables until she’s done punching it around.
Or consider the rollicking “You Never Get What You Want,” where Griffin employs a slight snarl and curled upper lip to add some leather to the cocky opening lyrics (“You first found me in my holding pen / Stopped to take a look and stuck your finger in / I bit one off and you came back again and again.”) As the song progresses Griffin gets rowdier—channeling hues of Johnny Cash and Billy Idol into her performance until the end when she releases the pressure valve with a final lyric sung in almost a whisper.
Perhaps Griffin’s moments of full throttled clamor and troublemaker tones are a result of the divorce she had just endured, the exhausting years of waiting tables and patchwork temp jobs all through her twenties, or how she learned to keep unpleasant emotions on the inside as the youngest of seven children (all born within seven years.) “Emotions like anger were not in my vocabulary,” Griffin once recalled about her childhood. “They were not welcome.”
When you hear how Griffin wields control over her blazing pinnacle vocal moments within the more somber songs on the album like “Poor Man’s House,” “Forgiveness,” or “Let Him Fly” (covered by The Chicks on their 1999 album Fly), it makes total sense that she used to cover Pat Benatar songs in her high school band (and that she grew up close to a forest in Maine and had to have a big voice to yell back towards home.)
Recently I spoke with musician and music instructor John Curtis, who was Griffin’s former guitar teacher in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He told me when he heard Griffin’s singing voice in their first lesson together while she was still married, he was completely blown away, “I peeled myself off of the wall...one of the first words out of my mouth was, ‘You need to do this for a living.’”
What also gives Living With Ghosts such a propulsive rock energy in many of its offerings is how the acoustic guitar does double duty by adding big-heeled percussion to its job description. At the end of “Poor Man’s House,” Griffin’s forceful playing sounds like it could be a finale drum solo. Once you get to the amped-up back half of “Sweet Lorraine,” you can almost hear the cymbals in the way Griffin pulses her strings. Or in “Time Will Do The Talking,” it’s Griffin’s athletic strum that pushes her vocals into that previously mentioned rowdy (dare I say “badass”?) territory she inhabits just as effortlessly as she can corral a hushed moment with a teardrop in her voice.
The album’s raw and sometimes imperfect recording also infuses it with a rough-around-the-edges rock energy. Some of the songs were recorded in the Nashville kitchen of the album’s recording engineer, while others were recorded in a Boston apartment close to a hospital. If you listen carefully, you can hear ambulance sirens in “Forgiveness” and the album’s closing track “Not Alone.” Other songs like “Moses,” “You Never Get What You Want,” and “Poor Man’s House” flirt with mic pops or high vocal levels pushing against the limits of the recording hardware.
Releasing the album this way wasn’t the original plan when Griffin was signed to A&M. A curious pairing with producer Nile Rodgers to record tracks never saw the light of day, which was apparently not a problem for Griffin. “I love Nile Rodgers, otherwise I never would have bothered to work with him,” she told The Washington Post, adding, "Man, if there's one thing I hope does not ever circulate, it's that stuff.”
Next, she recorded the songs with a band in New Orleans at Daniel Lanois’ Kingsway Studios with producer Malcolm Burn. A&M wasn’t happy with the results and neither was Griffin who felt the songs lacked the power and integrity of her original demos.
"l asked them [A&M] if they would release my songs as they originally heard them, namely, my guitar and my voice” Griffin recalled to Raleigh, North Carolina’s Spectator in 1997. “Realizing that they were attached to those solo performances made me appreciate the strength of them and gave me guts to ask if they'd put them out that way. And they did. I have to give A&M credit."
After some re-recording of vocals on several of the songs, along with some minimal production clean-up and sweetening, A&M released Living With Ghosts with skeletal promotional fanfare on May 21, 1996. In the liner notes, Griffin thanked Malcolm Burn and the New Orleans crew that worked on the shelved version of the album, proving at the outset that Griffin was a class act.
On Living With Ghosts, Griffin stripped out all of the noise that shrouded her intense and intimate songcraft and pushed for the album to be heard the way she wanted. “It represents what I’ve been doing for the last few years. It’s kind of scary to put it out this way,” she said at the time. “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.”
Sticking to your guns and demanding your art is only sent out into the world once it meets your high standards. I can’t think of anything more Rock ‘n’ Roll than that.
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