American kid

"American Kid is Patty Griffin's first album of primarily original material since 2007's Children Running Through. It's her most stripped-down recording since her debut, Living with Ghosts ... These songs are mostly acoustic; one can hear traces of early blues, various American folk styles, gospel, and vintage country music in her brand of Americana ... The space in the high lonesome "Go Wherever You Wanna Go," with Luther [Dickinson]'s National steel guitar playing slide in counterpart to Griffin's earthy vocal, is almost spooky. The combined supplication and exhortation in the haunted "Don't Let Me Die in Florida" carries traces of prewar and Memphis blues ... While the theme of mortality runs deep through American Kid, so does the celebration of life. Roughshod and unpredictable songs engage it in the present as well as the past, through courage, fear, love, memory, and the grainy, knotty, often invisible ties that bind. With its immediacy, economy, cagey strength,andvulnerability, Griffin delivers these 12 songs not as gifts or statements, but as her own evidence of what is, what was, and what yet may come".

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"Griffin reaches deep for the songs, taking her father's part as a young man on Not a Bad Man and the piano ballad Irish Boy, while the lovely Ohio, to which her sidekick, Robert Plant, adds harmonies, reflects on waters that are "softer and deeper than time". A triumph".

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"When Griffin turns the unlikely line "God is a wild old dog/Someone left out on the highway" into a profound meditation on spirituality, all smeared vowels and sparkling guitars, it's clear her writing remains as surprising as it is masterful".

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