Patty and the Oh’s

In 2022, Patrick wrote and recorded Patty & The Oh’s forthcoming debut album, “Out of Everything,” produced by Taylor Carroll at Bear Creek Studio (Brandi Carlile, The Strokes, Regina Spektor) with bandmates Dune Butler, William Mapp, Charles Wicklander, and Ashley Weatherly. There’s a full-circle aspect to having ended up in the Northwest to record their upcoming album since Kurt Cobain and Nirvana were Patrick’s biggest musical influences as a kid, and the rest of the band members are from Seattle. 

Patrick grew up in Alabama making punk, grunge, and rap metal music with his classmates not far from where The Louvin Brothers played their brand of country gospel music decades prior, in the 1950s. His father’s work as a Methodist minister took him everywhere in the state—from the home of songwriting greats like Hank Williams Sr. and Lionel Richie to the Tennessee River Valley banks of W.C. Handy, where the Delmore Brothers sang their Brown’s Ferry Blues.

Most of Patty & The Oh’s songs are about social justice issues that often directly contradict popular notions of Southern ethos and politics. Patrick says, “In my opinion, some of the greatest country singers of all time, like Johnny Cash and John Prine, used songwriting to challenge their own culture’s norms and took on some of the same social issues in their day that we face today. They put complex thoughts about the world’s injustices into a digestible song form so the public could relate to and connect through it. I see my music more as a part of their lineage than anything else–I may be from the South, but I’ve never related to Southern politics a day in my life. And I’ll keep trying to address my own culture’s moral failings in the face of political corruption, even if that makes me an outsider in my home state.”

Patrick left the South fifteen years ago to study poetry in New England, living for several years on the seacoast of New Hampshire and Maine, where he learned the craft by reading poets like Ted Berrigan, Emily Dickinson, Fernando Pessoa, Kobayashi Issa, Gwendolyn Brooks, and John Ashbery. During this time living in New England, Patrick met his wife, Ashley, a writer and baker originally from Seattle and now backing vocalist of The Oh’s. They have moved around the country for the last decade, finding temporary homes in Seattle, Nashville, Boston, and rural Washington and Oregon.

Patrick still likes turnip greens, cornbread, and listening to Blind Willie Johnson from the screen porch with a glass of sweet tea. His songwriting remains rooted in old country and blues forms, just applied to a different genre—pop rock—meant for a 2022 audience instead of 1962. In a political reality that constantly divides and separates us based on where we live and what our identity is supposed to be, how about some music that connects and brings it all back together instead?