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Videos by American Songwriter
Griffin’s characters – grieving sons and daughters, wide-eyed immigrants, young and drunk army veterans – find themselves looking in the mirror time and time again on American Kid, horrified and confused at what they see. “I bet you see a stranger when you look at me,” sings the former soldier on “I Am Not A Bad Man.” “When I look in the mirror I know that’s what I see.” American Kid is a meditation on mourning, but Griffin’s narrators are wrestling with grief and angst both personal and communal. In honoring her father, Patty Griffin has ended up writing her most acutely political record to date, reckoning and wrestling with looming, dark stories, with the secret shames and communal disappointments that live in the space between what Bruce Springsteen calls “the distance between the American dream and the American reality.”
When discussing her father, a veteran who staunchly opposed the war in Iraq during the last years of his life, Griffin is eager to discuss politics: “I think that this country has really allowed us to stay innocent and naive, in not always good ways,” she says. “We need to be really clear about our history and what everybody here has been through. It’s not all apple pie; that’s the tiniest portion of the story.” Those other stories are hinted at throughout American Kid, in the bloody hounds chasing down runaway slaves in “Ohio,” in the trauma and bad dreams of a young soldier returned home in “I Am Not A Bad Man,” and in the plea in the opening “Go Wherever You Wanna Go.” “You don’t ever have to pay the bills no more, break a sweat or walk a worried floor now,” Griffin belts, as she breaks the quiet peace of a loving tribute to her father’s newly found freedom after death, a way to say that money and bills and stress might be enough to keep any young man’s apple pie American dreams a distant fantasy.
American Kid recasts individual grief as collective regret and disillusion. It shows a perpetually naive nation finally looking itself at the mirror, terrified at what it’s become. “I’m just an American kid” is the only excuse the singer in “I’m Not A Bad Man” can muster for all the bloodshed and awful nightmares, for the drugs abused and relationships lost. American Kid is a violent, quietly angry record, full of simmering stories of war, slavery, sex and death. Many of the songs start broad and slowly unravel into specifics, exposing secrets and unmasking hushed histories. In “Please Don’t Let Me Die In Florida,” Griffin hollers and growls her narrator’s tale of sweat and despair over the Dickinson’s murky Memphis stomp:
Well I went to war to fight the Japs
When the war was over I threw my cap
Just as far as you could throw a thing
I went home and gave my girl a ring
I put the highways and the blacktop down
Turned the prairies into the town
And those hills gave way just like a wedding gown
I put the highways and the blacktop down
Such moments of disappointments reshaped into small victories, hardships turned into lifetimes, are the lifeblood of Griffin’s most recent work. “Well this party’s turned a corner,” Griffin sings as she brings American Kid to a sharp halt. It’s the opening line, one that may best sum up her new album, to “That Kind of Lonely,” a Nashville tearjerker that Griffin wrote about trying to finally grow up. American Kid is built around those types of epiphanies and realizations, whether it’s a middle-aged adult finally coming to terms with his failures, a great nation confronting its dark secrets, or a lonely traveler seeing all the beauty and sadness in the world in a stray highway dog, wondering if there really is a god after all. For Patty Griffin, to pay tribute is to be awakened, to look anew in the mirror with the maturity and perspective that may only come with hurt and healing. “There are so many things going on here that we shouldn’t be as innocent about as we are trying to be,” Griffin says, perhaps not realizing that her new songs may be a small part of the solution.
