US indie artist recalls childhood in 1980s Korea

Griffith James / Courtesy of Griffith James

By Daniel J. Springer

To describe a debut album as "a lifetime in the making," is a level of cliche that will usually induce emphatic eye rolls and loud sighs from just about everyone. However, in the case of "Comfortably High," by Griffith James, such a statement is indeed true on multiple levels.

For one, there's his upbringing within the International Church of Christ (ICC). Then there's his years of living as a mistrustful homeless youth in Seattle and San Francisco. There were 10 years of collecting the pixels bit by bit of the album, "wandering" and "putting many disparate pieces under the same roof," experiencing the life of the teenage transient and busking street musician, amongst other things.

And finally, you have "Comfortably High," released Sept. 17, which only started with the idea of the artist recording maybe a couple singles with Denver-based indie darlings, Tennis, who went on to produce this album.

It all amounts to a lifetime's entirety up to that point, flashed and distilled in a single album.

But we should go back to the beginning for now, as this is a rather winding and at times circuitous path through some very thick forest.

The artist moved 17 times between Seattle, Seoul and Dallas by the age of 18. He was raised inside the International Churches of Christ (ICC), a very insular, anti-establishment church founded in the 1970s by Kip McKean.

His parents were complete devotees, having been selected as missionaries to help the church start new branches both in the United States and abroad. This connection is how Griffith first came to Seoul, at about age 3 in the late 1980s.

Griffith James in his preschool uniform in the late 1980s or early 1990s / Courtesy of Denise Snyder

"We moved there never expecting to leave, that it was a lifelong decision, that my brother and I would be raised there," he told The Korea Times. "I was still very young, but it was a magical place to me. I remember being pushed in shopping carts, eating tteokbokki and dipping my kimchi in a water glass. Almost every time we cooked rice, I would be sure to put my face over the rice cooker to breath in the aromatic steam of the rice."

His parents were busy working and studying Korean language at Seoul National University, so he recalled that he and his brother were raised by a Korean woman whom he knew only as "Lydia." After about three years in Korea, his mother contracted a nasty life-threatening case of tuberculosis, so the family returned to the U.S.

"To be honest, Korea really stole our hearts, and it was very tragic that we had to leave when we did," he said. So much so, in fact, that when he told his mother he was making an appearance on Korean radio, she started to get a little misty. "She loved the people of Korea that much, and still does."

Griffith James in his preschool uniform in the late 1980s or early 1990s / Courtesy of Denise Snyder

In the meantime while Griffith's family was in Seoul, the ICC was becoming more authoritarian and isolated with each passing year. One example of the common practices listed by cultwatch.com was "discipling," where one member brings in another and has total authority over the new devotee, including having a final say as to what their disciple may wear, where they may work and who they may marry. Another practice was heavy tithing, or financial duties and required donations to the church.

It is even alleged that ICC followers were instructed to imitate those they were disciples of, even in vocal inflection and facial hair, and those practices of course trickled up to the group becoming a massive congregation of those aping the founder.

By the time Griffith was a senior in high school, it was all too much cognitive dissonance for him, and he ran away from home. Due to some of the practices listed above, the ICC began to implode completely and, to the artist's thinking, became at odds with God, causing the environment in which he'd lived his entire life to crumble to dust.

Thus, he went to the forests of Humboldt County, California, for a month and eventually onto living the life of a homeless youth, starting in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. While he's open about his time living on the streets, he's quick to point out both his privilege and circumspect nature at the time.

"There was never a time that I really would have considered myself homeless as I could have decided to leave and stay with any number of friends and family," he said. "Unfortunately, I didn't really trust many people back then. I felt that there was always an ulterior motive to bring me back into the fold of the [ICC] with anyone I knew growing up. And because I had only lived in that bubble, I didn't know many people outside of it."

There followed years of street living: busking, helping junkies sell random items, buying drugs to sell with friends and smoking all of it, and on and on. "It was all very…idealistic," he stated both succinctly and sarcastically.

After a lifetime living in a church seeking salvation, it must be noted that the forces of irony must have been smiling with what was occurring in the subtext of this life. Mistrustful of those he knew, he found salvation thanks to a Buddhist monk he had met years earlier who took him in.

Naturally living hard on the streets and in parks weighed down on the artist's mental health, leading to some very scary breakdowns. Thus, he would visit the monk in his Seattle basement to stay a while and get things in order. "While I stayed there, I had to follow his monastic morning regimen before going out into my day. He honestly saved me. He warned me about my junkie girlfriend at the time, and helped me break that off. He gave me a sane path through what felt like a lifetime of madness and disconnect."

Having been brought up in the ICC and still knowing very little about life outside of it, the monk offered him a new perspective and fresh outlook. Teaching him breathing techniques to focus his frayed emotions during times of stress, the monk also brought to bear on Griffith that "no thought was good or bad."

In summation, Griffith said, "It was what I needed to hear after being raised in such a dogmatic environment. He had no agenda and I really needed some sort of authority figure who could point me in any direction with no secret agenda."

Fast forward a lifetime later, with a divorce in tow and a pandemic at hand in early 2020. Over the years, Griffith had continued to write songs and live rather directionlessly, wondering all the time if anyone would one day hear them.

Thinking back to his time in the California forests, he remembered an epiphany he had that would help him realize "Comfortably High." He wrote, "The way to find your path is realizing you never left it."

During a U.S. lockdown in April, Griffith had written a couple of songs that he sent to his manager, who forwarded it to Tennis, the duo of Patrick Riley and Alaina Moore. They immediately asked him to come to their studios, and what was initially planned as two songs eventually morphed into the full-length debut album.

Just like the monk in the basement, Tennis showed him the way.

"Working with them was a dream. I tend to be very exploratory, which can make studio sessions drag on if you don't have someone driving the ship with quick judgment calls," he explained. "Ultimately each song only took two or three days, which was light years faster than I've ever done it.

"They also initiated me into the Dangermouse style of production, which is very simple. You get the song to work with just bass, drums and vocals. Then every overdub is very sparing. It makes each song feel very focused and it doesn't rely on too many condiments."

The result is a very concise 28 minutes ― a lifetime distilled into an incredibly focused debut album. The track, "Jesus Honey," is an obvious rejection of his upbringing within the ICC, singing of falling in love with sin, with other songs like "Obscene Boy," which deal with such ruminations on his past. The lead single to the album, "Market and Black," features the vocals of Alaina Moore, which James credits as tying the whole room together, as far as making it a song.

It also brings the entirety of the album's concept into complete focus:

"Please be yourself, Follow the sound that won't echo then die, Follow the heat that seeks to be warm, Seek all the winters deep in your thorns, Oh, mark it in black, Spray all your images bleeding and cracked, Wash all these walls, Carpet and clutter stink up the halls."

Like the life experience itself, the album's depth of subject matter and seriousness is almost lulled out of focus and sneaks up at poignant moments through the arrangements put together by Tennis and Griffith James. As the pensive, smoky soft piano-centered ballad of "Any Day" starts off to close the album, it states dreamily, "Into the echo, I'm lost."

These words sounds contradictory for closing the album, but as he explained, "My whole life so far has been me forgetting and remembering it. There is no event that truly disconnects us from ourselves. We have to lose ourselves to find ourselves sometimes. And that's really what this album is about."

Daniel J. Springer is the creator, producer and host of the radio show "The Drop with Danno" on GFN in Gwangju, broadcasting nightly from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m.