Patty Griffin - Living With Ghosts
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Category: Music CD
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CD Details
Artist: Patty GriffinEdition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 1996-05-21
Music Label: Fontana a&M
Soundtracks:
- Moses
- Let Him Fly
- Every Little Bit
- Time Will Do The Talking
- Mad Mission
- Poor Man's House
- Forgiveness
- You Never Get What You Want
- Sweet Lorraine
- Not Alone
Music reviews of Living With Ghosts
Music Review: Amazing talent!
Rating: 5 Stars
I first saw Patty on Austin City Limits and was impressed. Then I had occasion to hear one song from this CD, "Forgiveness." That inspired me to buy the CD and I was not disappointed. If it's too strong to call this a CD for the ages, then I would say it's at least a major contribution to contemporary music. First, understand that it is a collection of "demo" songs--just voice and guitar, with nothing in the way of special effects. Adam Steinberg assists on guitar on "Let Him Fly," and Ty Tyler assists on "Time Will Do the Talking." The acoustic environment is the same on each song. That tends to make it a musician's CD. The pleasures it offers up are these: excellent, original acoustic guitar work, perfectly in tune singing, highly original intelligent lyrics delivered with passionate intensity and sensitivity in equal measure. Warning: may cut too close to the bone for some tastes! Above all what Patty projects is total involvement in the music. You are sucked in whether you like it or not. She has an amazing palette of expressive timbre, from incredibly biting yet vulnerable (as in the final "DO ya, baby" iterations on "You Never Get What You Want") to the nearly inaudible (at the end of "Not Alone" to the primal yells in "Every Little Bit." Emotional expression in the lyrics runs from bitter irony ("Every Little Bit," "You Never Get What You Want") to deep empathy ("Not Alone"). I still don't know what some of the songs mean on a literal level (what do you make of a song that begins "We are swimming with the snakes at the bottom of the well / So silent and peaceful in the darkness where we fell"? Images of the Fall of Man and the Worm Uroboros come to mind...), but on the intuitive level they make perfect sense. Her chording on the guitar is perfectly in sync with the emotional content of the lyrics. On "Let Him Fly" and "Not Alone" she makes effective use of D tuning. At times you can hear echoes of Dylan, Joni Mitchell and others, but overall Patty remains herself throughout. This is a CD you can listen to over and over again, and always discover something new and important. Essential listening for anyone interested in contemporary folk, alt-country, singer-songwriters, lyric-oriented listeners. Need I add that the editorial review on Amazon.com is totally off base? Enjoy.
Description of Living With Ghosts
It's not surprising that Living With Ghosts, the first Patty Griffin album, has all the immediacy and intimacy of a bunch of demos knocked up by a songwriter during those brief early moments when the songs are still vibrantly new and exciting, zipping around in her brain like atoms in a molecule that's about to tear itself apart. After all, a bunch of demos is exactly what it is. Recorded back in 1996, the rootsy young Bangor, Maine singer-songwriter used these minimal acoustic guitar and voice recordings to score a publishing contract but, fortunately for anybody who loves nothing better than a good song well sung, they were considered good enough to release in their raw state. Comparisons to Bruce Springsteen crop up in her press reviews, but she's really somewhere in between Bonnie Raitt and Lucinda Williams, sparky and sincere, honest and uncomplicated. Although lacking the production values and country-rock band arrangements of her later albums, songs like "Let Him Fly" and "Every Little Bit" need nothing more than Griffin gives them here. --Johnny BlackFolk CDs
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