Living With Ghosts by Patty Griffin

Living With Ghosts, Patty Griffin's debut album, arrived on A&M on May 21, 1996, and in a year of loud guitars and louder haircuts it sounds like somebody quietly closing the door. Griffin's writing leans toward the stripped-down end of folk, and here the songs come first and the frills a distant second. Her voice does the heavy lifting, sliding from a near-whisper to a raw, full-throated ache without ever playing to the back row.

"Moses" is the track the countdowns picked up, but the album hangs together as one long, unvarnished confession. It kept finding listeners long after its release: according to Billboard it's her best-selling album, with more than 222,000 copies sold in the US by January 2010. Flaming Red came next.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.