Patty Griffin, American Kid, album review "Lefty has become a favourite of mine, and the song I Want To Be With You Always was going to be on American Kid but Buddy Miller took it for his album so I moved over to Mom & Dad's Waltz, which was more appropriate for the record, anyway. I never really grew up around country music, even though Maine is small and as hillbilly and redneck as anywhere else. I grew up with Motown and rock 'n' roll but I have been around country for the past 15 years and I thought I should really study this music. Someone gave me a Lefty record just before I was going on a long drive through Texas after I had told them I needed to listen to some country music. Lefty, who died aged 47, was the first who really got me. He is special, and his songs are really vulnerable. Griffin is a wonderful and original songwriter and among the highlights of American Kid is Wild Old Dog, a song that on the surface is about an abandoned pet but is also a profound meditation on spirituality, loss and ageing. Griffin explains: "I wanted to do something creative out of an experience when I was driving back from Nashville to Austin during a 13-hour drive. It was cloudy and just as the sun was coming out, I saw a dog on the highway. There had been tornado watches on the radio and the air was sizzling. Everything was shiny because it had been raining and this brown dog came out of the long grass. This dog was beautiful, running so fast like a bat of hell. It was so beautiful it took my breath away. I had my little dogs asleep in the back of the car and I realised, after driving on for a whole, that it must have been one of those dogs that people put out on the highway and abandon. That really haunted me, you know, for a long time. That Kind Of Lonely, perhaps my favourite track on the album, has searing vocals that suit the desolate lyrics. Griffin says of the song: "It was about a part of my life when I had a sort of delayed adolescence. I went to work right away when I was 18 when a lot of people in America go to college to hang out and party for four years. I went to work and got married really young so never really had wild adolescent times. So, sometime in my mid-thirties, I thought I would start doing that and then I realised I was getting too old for that and told myself it was time to grow up. It's what That Kind of Lonely is about and it's a song I tweaked for a long time. The most edgy song on the album is Not A Bad Man, which is about a traumatised young soldier. Griffin explains what prompted it. "There was a marine who had returned home from Iraq to Austen, Texas, where I live. A lot of kids got lured in by the marketing campaign and joined up and they weren't really sure who they were fighting. It was after 9/11 and the Twin Towers had come down and these boys were going to go and fight. For me, that was a very terrifying time to be in America and to be an American. Lots of our soldiers came home really damaged after they realised they were harming people they didn't know. They began to question what were they doing. I read a story in a local paper about a family who were trying to get a young family member out of the military and get him some mental health care. That didn't prove possible and he ended up dead and it wasn't clear whether it was a suicide. So I wrote the song to get inside that kid, if I could. American Kid is a triumph of songwriting and expressive singing. "American Kid" is released on New West Records. Patty Griffin will be touring the UK from July 19 to 26.