Lounge music: An intimate gig with singer-songwriter Jacob Golden

Jacob Golden is running a little late for his gig, but none of the audience seems to mind. In fact, everyone's happy to wait around at my place – because that's where he's performing. A singer-songwriter who expresses big complicated emotions in a small intimate style, the California-born musician has built up a small but fervent following by bringing his music into his fans' homes in Britain and America.

Responding to requests via MySpace to give free shows in your fans' homes (and usually to spend the night there afterwards) might not be the quickest, easiest or most profitable way to reach the public. But it generates a special bond with your audience: "You make an unbelievable life-long connection with those people," he agrees.

It's a strategy that's been effectively pioneered by Pete Doherty, but Golden is unlikely to be found shooting up in the bathroom or selling the family silver: he's more likely to make a polite request for another glass of Pinot Noir or to inquire if he can close the shutters.

Shy, gentle and softly spoken, with confessional lyrics and a fragile, androgynous voice (comparisons have ranged from to Mercury Rev, Neil Young and Thom Yorke to Jeff Buckley and Simon and Garfunkel), it's a wonder he can summon up the nerve to perform at such close quarters to his audience.

Tonight, there are 20 of us, from small children to middle-aged adults – and the family dog – crammed into the living room. Most are unfamiliar with any of his songs, though the teenage girls know "On a Saturday", from its immortalisation in the last-ever episode of the youth TV series The OC.

Eventually, our headline act is ready. He closes the shutters, lights some candles, picks up his acoustic guitar, glances shyly at his girlfriend Sarah, who is sitting cross-legged at the front, and announces: "This makes me more nervous than a proper crowd at a venue."

Golden's songs are intimate confessionals – "I think in melodies, little catastrophes," he sings – charting his traumatic childhood as a single child who was orphaned by the age of 16, and how he chased his dream of a music career, only for it to crumble around him. He grew up with his German-born mother in Sacramento until she contracted cancer and became too sick to look after him any more. When he was seven she sent him to live with the father he had never known, only for him to die, as a result of diabetes, when Golden was 16.

An as-yet-unrecorded song, "Bluebird", recounts his story in soul-baring detail. "I spent the dark half of my lifetime praying to a record player," it begins. "In those psychedelic hymns we made the violence disappear." He explains: "My mother was a hippie, very Sixties-loving, and we had this shelter in our garage which she converted into an apartment for battered women. It was an amazing environment and very healthy. And then I went to my dad..." He pauses, and you could cut the silence with a knife. "He was pretty much full on, he had a pretty nasty temper, he was into going out, more of a partying thing, with the rock'*'roll energy. And what I became is the balance between those two things."

He first formed a group called Birthday who were signed to a UK deal by the Rough Trade founder Geoff Travis in the late 1990s, and brought to England. After a solitary EP the band broke up and went back to California while Golden spent the next two years living in Soho dreaming of superstardom."When I was living in London I wanted to be a rock star and got really caught up in being accepted by the NME and all that," reflects an older, wiser Golden eight years later. "So I was a bit ego-bruised when it didn't happen."

Neither a solo EP in 2001 nor a subsequent album, Hallelujah World, made much of an impression in a music scene becoming dominated by brash punkery. Disillusioned with his career, he returned to America to start a new life in Portland, Oregon. "I felt defeated," he confesses. "Ever since I was a small boy I'd felt that music was my salvation."

To clear his mind from his failed musical ambitions, he took a dispiriting job in "a nudist health spa for ageing hippies", reasoning that his muse would return when he was ready to respond. "Slowly music crept back into my head, with words and bits of melodies. But I didn't sing for a year." Things changed when, despite a mistrust of religion, he went on a silent retreat in Yosemite where no one spoke for 10 days. "I realised that what really mattered was not being a rock star but being genuine – even if that meant playing for 10 people."

On his return to Portland, he began to write songs again. One of the first was "On a Saturday". Recorded in his bedroom in Portland, it was inspired by his times in London, with its infectious closing refrain: " I want to sit and watch the girls in Soho Square, I fell in love so many times just sitting there."

He began trying out his new songs in people's homes, recording them in whatever spaces he could find – his bedroom, kitchen and hallway; underground car parks and concrete art galleries; even a studio toilet – creating a portfolio of modern "field recordings". Revenge Songs is not so much lo-fi (or no-fi) as genuinely home-made. "For me it represents the idea of accepting your inner struggle. The driving force of my music is my attempt to rise above my circumstances." He has succeeded.

On tour until 13 July. Request a living-room gig at www.myspace.com/themusicofjacobgolden; 'Revenge Songs' is out on Sawtooth on 9 July

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