'I came from another place'

The story behind Larkin Grimm's mystical music is no fairy tale

Larkin Grimm's story sounds like a figment of someone's rampant imagination, except most people couldn't dream up the life the 27-year-old singer-songwriter has already lived. It's hard to fathom all her drama and even harder to ignore its connection to her music.

Grimm was born in Memphis to hippie parents who lived in a commune and belonged to the Christian sect (some would say cult) the Holy Order of MANS. When she was 6, Grimm and her family moved to a small town in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia, where she got her first taste of feeling like an outsider. She won a scholarship to study art at Yale but dropped out after becoming disillusioned with the school's elitism; she was one credit shy of graduating.

At one point Grimm, who plays the Middle East Upstairs on Thursday, ended up in Thailand and studied healing massage. She spent a summer hitchhiking across Alaska as a self-professed "radical environmentalist," holed up in a tent and living off nuts and berries. While there, she claims, she befriended a Cherokee shaman named Jezebel Crow. This past October Grimm released "Parplar," her third and most gripping album yet.

Who's going to believe all that, right? On paper, Grimm's experiences smack of good fiction, the work of an artist vehemently devoted to her own mythology. But when you hear her music, it all makes sense.

"When people review my albums, they talk about these 'dream-like explorations,' but that's not true at all," she says from New York, where she recently put down roots for the first time in a few years. "I came from another place, from another country. These things in my songs are very real to me."

Grimm's music gets saddled with all sorts of labels - most often freak-folk or, as she has described it, "experimental old-time Southern music" - but essentially it's the soundtrack to the circus in her head. She writes what she knows: spirituality, a deep commitment to mysticism, and the healing powers of art.

"I have a career in the Northeast, the West Coast, and Europe, places where people don't know about the culture I come from," she says. "I'm trying to tell them to wake up."

Grimm has been speaking her mind since childhood. "My mother stressed the importance of realizing our similarities with other people rather than differences," she says. "People respected me as a child. They didn't think children should be seen and not heard. Creativity and speech were encouraged."

Her earliest musical memories spring from her father, a fiddler who also entertained fleeting dreams of being a rock star. Her first instrument was the upright bass, but the dulcimer was the first one she mastered. Lately she's been into the banjo. Grimm also gravitates toward noise music, which was partly why a few years ago she moved to Providence, home of noise icons such as Lightning Bolt.

When the family moved to Georgia, Grimm went into culture shock. Their alternative thinking stood out in the conservative mountain town, and Grimm remembers feeling like she might be taken away from her parents.

"There was a lot of danger in my childhood, and I was aware of it," she says. "You wanted to look good for society so that it didn't try to bring you down."

Mindful of its surroundings, the Grimm family went to a different church every Sunday, forever in search of one that felt right, that they felt didn't preach hate. Grimm says it was an obvious effort to fit in, a notion she would later dismantle with her music, especially on her latest album.

Unlike her previous albums, "Parplar" sounds like an announcement, a fierce missive from an artist who has found her calling. By turns frenzied and elliptical, the album resonates with the brash energy of a caged animal finally being released into the open.

"We know it's a schizophrenic album," she concedes. "A lot of records are all about one mood, but mine isn't that. With my other records, I was experimenting with sounds. I didn't think of myself as a singer. I was still thinking of myself as a trained painter. I wasn't ready to be known for my music."

When she was, Grimm turned to Michael Gira, a musician (Angels of Light) and owner of her new label, Young God Records. "He really balanced out my feminine energy," she says, "and brought out a lot of my sexiness. He was a tremendous muse for me."

The respect is mutual. Gira - who's renowned for mentoring the artists on his label, most notably Devendra Banhart - has said of Grimm: "I don't consider her folk . . . she is pre-folk, even pre-music. She is the sound of the eternal mother and the wrath of all women."

Grimm would agree. "A lot of the songs on the album are about women's sexual power," she says. "I don't see anything wrong with women exerting that kind of power, because sometimes it's all we've got."

Along with her dulcimer and guitar, Grimm uses her voice as part of the storytelling. She can sing gorgeous, porcelain folk, but she sounds like no one else when she explores the fringes of her voice, whether she's erupting in hair-raising wails or otherworldly chants.

It took a few attempts to capture the sometimes brutal honesty at the core of "Parplar," a quality Grimm also credits to Gira. "Michael would say, 'Larkin, as soon as you write a song, send it to me. Don't do a second draft.' "

It seems odd that she would censor herself, considering suppression doesn't suit Grimm. This is, after all, a woman who rants in great detail on her MySpace blog about why she refuses to vote (bottom line: she's an anarchist) and once called Barack Obama "a eunuch for president." And there are notorious stories of how Grimm handles someone who's not respecting her during a performance.

Clearly, Grimm isn't afraid to stand her ground - an essential part of her mission to tell the truth.

"I feel like I've been on a long journey to break down walls and barriers," she says. "And there's more to be done."

James Reed can be reached at jreed@globe.com.