Lisa Germano - The Sweet Obsession

Lisa Germano belongs to that elect breed of outstanding talents. Relegating her to the mere rank of singer-songwriter might even seem reductive, given that we're dealing with a musician-composer with an enviable pedigree. Her albums are small sonic miniatures that reveal themselves little by little, as if coated in subtle layers waiting to be deciphered. Her stories, seemingly quiet and minimal, always conceal a dramatic tension, a chilling crescendo of anguish worthy of the noirest songwriters of all time. Musically, her songbook manages to blend traditional folk, alternative rock, dark blues and classical music. Hers is the darkest face of that typically female “intimate” songwriting that, from Joni Mitchell onward, has given rock a deeper sensibility.

As with many other female songwriters of recent years (Tori Amos, Sinéad O'Connor, PJ Harvey), for this refined musician from Indiana too the line between life and art is thin: “I like to put all of myself into my songs, to express different feelings, even the scariest ones – she says – That doesn't make me feel vulnerable, actually it can be a kind of catharsis. But it all happens in a very personal and spontaneous way, there's nothing contrived about it”.

Lisa Germano is a born anti-diva. Perhaps because of her reserved nature, perhaps because of the introverted and intricate nature of her songs, always far from easy commercial appeal (she broke with a major label, Capitol, to keep her artistic freedom first with indie label 4AD, then with her own label Ineffable, before finally landing at YoungGod).

But music is an integral part of her genetic makeup. Born in Mishawaka, Indiana, on June 27, 1958, to two classical musicians, she could already play the violin at age seven. She then specialized in string instruments, favoring country and folk genres and playing in several traditional music groups. “Around the age of 18 I got tired of classical music – she says –. But I was afraid of becoming a singer, I didn't like my voice, I didn't like myself… So I got married at 20. The marriage lasted eight years: the worst years of my life because I couldn't play my own music”. It ended in divorce: “The problems arose when I freed myself of my insecurities and started taking on a dominant role. It ended, but without resentment: we remained very good friends”.

Songwriter John Mellencamp immediately recognized her full talent, bringing her on tour at his side as a violinist. Other performances followed as support act for concerts by Bob Seger and Simple Minds.

The Darkest Night of All

In 1991, at age 33, comes her debut LP, On The Way Down From Moon Palace. A delicate, experimental album, predominantly folk in character but shot through with flashes of classical music, blues and country. Lisa Germano plays every instrument herself (violin, guitar, mandolin, piano, accordion), conjuring mini-concertos of exquisite chords and subtly shaded contrasts, in a labyrinth of sound and surreal visions. Out of this come entirely instrumental pieces like the title track, "Callin'", "Screaming Angels Dancing In Your Garden", "Simply Tony" and the sublime baroque sonata of "Dark Irie" — proof of a musical talent as versatile in its range of references and nuances as it is restrained and sober in its final sonic shape.

The sung tracks, meanwhile, immediately reveal the distinctive mark of the Indiana singer-songwriter: vocal lines that never scratch like a rocker's, nor carry the nasal twang of country singers, but dissolve into a diaphanous, velvety whisper, set against arrangements that are always spare and blurred at the edges. A bittersweet voice, at its best in nursery-rhyme refrains like "Cry Baby" — one of her most intense songs ever, its aching melody winding its way through fragile harmonic cartilage — or in lullabies of childlike candor ("Riding My Bike", for mandolin and drums), or again in blues numbers steeped in congealed pain, like "Blue Monday" and "Dig My Own Grave", which let slip, here and there, that bucolic taste inherited from master Mellencamp, also evident in the rustic country of "Guessing Game" and "Bye Bye Little Doggie". In seemingly more conventional songs, like "Hanging With A Deadman", Lisa tries to give her ghosts and demons a song-shaped form; elsewhere it's just a hushed ramble, lost on the wind ("The Other One").

Moon Palace is a songbook on the drama of the female condition, steeped in the bleakest, most melancholy existentialism. A work as spare as it is complex and refined, one that elegantly weds traditional folk, dark blues and classical music.

Lisa Germano's psychoanalytic soliloquies continue with Happiness (1993), the album that cemented her standing in indie circles, helped along by a fuller production and the presence of an actual band alongside her in the studio. The instrumental pieces bear the brunt of this change — considerably scaled back here compared with the debut — and some of the magic of that bloodless, atmospheric sound forged at the Moon Palace is lost along with it. Yet the Indiana singer-songwriter's gift for chiseling emotions and melodies out of her intricate sessions of self-examination remains intact.

The Indiana singer-songwriter tries to step outside her comfort zone, venturing into more turbulent experiments that push hard on the contrast between rough-edged sounds and the thin filigree of her singing, veering almost into grunge territory with the anthemic "Everyone's Victim", or moving into rootsy country-rock on the vibrant "Energy" and Celtic tradition on the quirky "You Make Me Want Wear Dresses". Caught halfway between the two is a track like "Puppet", which flirts with rock without losing its composure.

Aside from the odd adrenaline rush, though, what dominates is an air of looming drama, drawing on the sepulchral litanies of Nico and the most desolate ballads of Lou Reed. The key device remains a kind of self-commentary, often cynical and disenchanted, ranging from the despondent soliloquy of "Around The World" ("what a waste to feel the way I feel") to the bitter existential reflection of the title track, drowned in a labyrinth of strings, guitars and mandolin ("Give it up, try again, ain't life fun… happiness"), from the nursery-rhyme-shaped reckoning of "Bad Attitude" ("You wish it was sunny but it's not… ah ah ah") to the irresistible cadence of "Sycophant", where Lisa's austere singing is scarred by dissonant violins and spectral keyboards. Elsewhere, the barest minimum of ornament is enough to convey an emotion: "Cowboy" is nothing but the slender filigree of a country ballad for voice and acoustic guitar, "Puppet" just a humble refrain smudged with effects. And the final destination, at the end of this chaotic stream of consciousness (and disparate sounds), can only be the darkness of solitude: "The Darkest Night Of All" snuffs out even the last ray of light, retreating into a cocoon of melancholy unease, its lulling gait colliding head-on with its funereal title.

Lisa Germano is in constant struggle with herself, with her childhood anxieties, her phobias and her paranoias, but she tries to exorcise them through fairy-tale, sinister lullabies. Happiness, in any case, is also probably her most "rock" record, the one in which, at the height of the grunge era, she tried to hitch her psychodramas to fuller, harsher, more dissonant sonic architectures.

A Woman's Calvary

The culmination of this journey of self-analysis is unquestionably Geek The Girl, one of the great masterpieces of the Nineties. A record that gradually tightens its grip on the listener in an atmosphere of draining suspense. Recorded entirely at home, produced by Malcolm Burn and Germano herself (who plays multiple instruments: guitar, keyboards, violin), it's a concept album about unhappiness, steeped in a dark existentialism. A woman's calvary portrayed in small sonic panels that take in themes such as loneliness, alienation, the inability to connect with others, wounded feelings, sexual violence. The tension never explodes; instead it seeps in gradually, through a sequence of crepuscular ballads built on the use of multiple instruments and constant shifts in sound that prove essential to dramatizing the narrative framework. Germano herself switches between different registers, almost as if trying to voice the various characters crowding her nightmares. The effect is evocatively "theatrical", yet always contained within rigidly minimalist boundaries.

The interludes of Italian tarantella (an old Sicilian folk tune called "Frascilita") that split the record into three parts create a disorienting effect: the festive rhythm injects a forced cheerfulness into what is otherwise pure drama and pain, while at the same time sharpening the "alienated" quality of this performance, as though its protagonists were, deep down, nothing but puppets moved by some dark, ineluctable fate. And the narration — entrusted to the Indiana singer-songwriter's slender voice — is a whisper, tender and velvety, set against spare but pointed arrangements.

The songs on Geek The Girl are shivers down the spine. Shivers that terrify, like the confession of powerlessness in "My Secret Reason", or the faintly dissonant lullaby "Trouble" with its ferocious self-criticism ("And as I act I hate myself"), or the sexual torments of the title track. If "Cry Wolf" is another anguished act of self-blame ("You should have known better/ It's all your fault"), "Psychopath" is already the void, the abyss: the drama of a woman raped at home by her partner. Here we are truly in Nico's funereal territory: Lisa's voice turns childlike to intone the most chilling of lullabies (“…A psychopath, a psychopath/ he says he loves me And I’m alone/ and I am cold and paralyzed, I can’t move…”), while the surreal strumming of a guitar and a woman's crying (taken from an actual call to an emergency hotline) wind the tension up to breaking point. It's a story with autobiographical roots: "A man stalked me for a year," the American singer-songwriter recounts. "He wrote me letters, truly terrifying letters, telling me God had told him we were meant to be together. It frightens me that God could say things like that to people."

Some have chosen to read Geek The Girl as an indictment of men: "Nothing could be further from the truth," she counters. "It could have been called 'Geek the boy' and it wouldn't have made any difference." Nor is it a rebellion against imposed religiosity, as with Tori Amos: "I'm a believer, but not in the traditional sense," explains the Indiana singer-songwriter. "I believe God is in each of us, in our spirit. But it shouldn't be up to God to decide what's right or wrong — that should be up to each of us."

Lisa Germano doesn't banish her ghosts — quite the opposite: she makes them real and recounts them in a depersonalized way, in a desperate (and futile) attempt to exorcise them. The sinister harpsichord motif of "Sexy Little Girl Princess" does nothing to soften the pathos, while the feverish dialogue of "Cancer Of Everything", drowned in a sea of strings, culminates in the recognition of anguish as an inescapable existential undercurrent. All that's left, then, is to take refuge in an imaginary universe of love and colors (the dreamy "Of Love and Colors") or of stars (the tender melody of "Stars"). The calvary of Lisa the Sad thus closes on a moving, dreamlike yearning that opens the heart.

The fourth album, Excerpts From A Love Circus (1996), returns to the theme of a tormented childhood, weaving together psychedelic textures, tender lullabies and stirring blues, its obsessive violin lurking in the background and forever lending an undertow of unease. The sound grows even more ethereal, in keeping with the 4AD tradition, the label the American singer-songwriter had signed to since the previous record.

Once again what stands out is the Indiana artist's versatility, masked by the overall restraint of the arrangements. "Baby On The Plane", for instance, sounds almost disorienting as it weaves together violins and keyboards in a mood that's only superficially festive, punctuated by bass-drum hits. The grainy whisper of the new nursery rhyme "I Love A Snot" is heavily filtered, as if arriving from some dusty, bygone era, while the intensely sensual murmur of the folky "Bruises" is embellished with further refined violin embroidery. The intense "Messages From Sophia", meanwhile, finds Lisa Germano stepping into a French cabaret, amid piano chimes and the phrasing of a spectral accordion. Not even the pop openness of "Small Heads" offers any reassurance, hiding within it lyrics about alienation and loneliness that, once again, leave no way out. The effect of so much versatility is disorienting, if not downright schizophrenic: "A Beautiful Schizophrenic/ Where's Miamo-Tutti? by Dorothy" even weaves in the names and sounds of the two Germano household cats (Dorothy and Miamo-Tutti) into a maelstrom of dissonance introduced at a march-like pace and only partly smoothed over by the sweetness of the singing.

Lisa Germano's only consolation seems to be the majesty of nature, in which she takes refuge seeking peace, amid birdsong ("Singing To The Birds") and ecstatic musings ("Big, Big World").

More relaxed and settled overall, yet still sufficiently neurotic and spectral, Excerpts From A Love Circus seeks a way out of the paranoid tunnel of Geek The Girl, though it ultimately feels less cohesive and inspired.

Two years later came Slush, an odd experiment with the rhythm section of John Convertino and Joey Burns (aka Calexico) trying to inject some life into her litanies, though the result isn't especially brilliant. Only three tracks, moreover, are credited to the Indiana singer-songwriter, who plays at being a garage-rocker on "Tom Dick & Harry" before plunging back into her obsessive soliloquies ("If I Think Of Love") and her solemn litanies, with an austerity worthy of Classical music ("It's A Rainbow").

With Slide (1998), Lisa Germano returns instead to her typically austere, aching songbook, without losing the eccentric, dazed streak that marked her recent work, nor its accompanying instrumental palette of classical-leaning violins and cellos, dreamlike keyboards, ethereal guitars and old-fashioned accordions. The classicism of a piano ballad like "Guillotine" is paired with the childlike (and distorted) music-box of "Electrified"; the hushed, admirable melodies of "If I Think Of Love" and "Wood Floors" give way to the lopsided, lurching rhythms of "Crash" and "Turning Into Betty", while the booming drum of closer "Reptile" drags everything into a lunar party that feels very much like a hallucination. Lisa Germano's gift for carving radiant melodic openings out of harsh, thorny arrangements remains intact, as in opener "Way Below The Radio". And that chasm of lyrical emotion that moves and unsettles with every listen stays wide open ("Feeling good to not feel bad is way too weird for me… I wonder why it's so easy to be the way I hate, and so hard to turn around and say yeah", from "Crash").

A transitional record, almost too refined in its polished, eclectic songwriting to reach a wide audience, Slide closes out a decade of artistic glory for the Indiana singer-songwriter, blessed with talent but not with success: a near-permanent fate that would lead her to pair her work as a musician (songwriter and session player as needed) with a job as a librarian.

Lullabies, pigs and paper dolls

The new millennium opens with Lullaby For A Liquid Pig (2003), a complex and ambitious work with which the American artist adds another key piece to her career, moving through restless dreams, fragile ballads and shadowy atmospheres.

Germano's pieces are barely even songs anymore: they're transfigurations of so many dreams, where the surreal becomes the rule, where the grammar is the instinctive one of free association. Sounds appear and disappear, always just passing through, as in the most delirious films of David Lynch. Nothing is normal in the night this record sets out to tell. The carefree steel guitar of "It's A Party Time" isn't normal, as it dissolves into chaos. A sunny ballad like "Pearls" isn't normal either, with an orchestra drifting in and out before fading as if seen through frosted glass. The guitar-driven chant of "Paper Doll" isn't normal, unspooling suspended in a silence thick with noise and interference before stopping right at its peak, like a dream from which one suddenly wakes. "Liquid Pig" is a production gem, its distorted voice marching through the mists of a spectral atmosphere, like Black Tape For A Blue Girl remixed by Aphex Twin with Nico on vocals. Nightmarish sounds also wrap around "All The Pretty Lies", driven by an oppressive bassline, like the Cocteau Twins played at half speed.

The arrangements, as usual, highlight the grace and taste of a talent poached from classical music. The plucked strings of "Lullaby For A Liquid Pig" are pure chills. Tracks like "Candy" or "From A Shell" lean closer to chamber music than rock, something like a Joni Mitchell backed by a string quartet. The nocturnal parallel is confirmed by "To Dream", which closes the record on a whispered "away" swallowed up by the mixing board.

Over thirty-six minutes, Lisa Germano essentially sings the same song the whole time, but disguises it behind a musical genius for arrangement, production and compositional refinement that has few equals.

Having signed to Young God Records, the label of indie legend Michael Gira (already boasting the likes of Devendra Banhart, Akron Family, Mi and L'Au & co.), Lisa Germano releases In The Maybe World (2006), which renews the enchantment of a sound that is by now "classic" yet never predictable or mannered. Twelve short songs for a dreamlike delirium narrated under one's breath, with muted, minimal yet eclectic arrangements, thanks to constant grafts and unexpected variations. The piano brushes in the melodic lines, punctuated by the odd sparse guitar phrase, Sebastian Steinberg's bass and Patrick Warren's pump organ. The spectral hiss of the violin provides counterpoint, and together with cello and xylophone weaves a subtly disorienting web. Germano plays almost everything herself, singing and whispering her eternal-child's nursery rhyme right into the listener's ear, lost in the maze of her own phobias.

Compared to the alien soundscapes of the previous record, songwriting takes center stage in the compositional approach, pushing the atmospheric element into the background. Melodies and choruses are thus more prominent, but there's no shortage of the usual ability to astonish with a single chime, a tremor, a hint of distortion. And it's magic right from the opening lullaby of "The Day", almost a parable of life's cycle condensed into a single day. The newfound awareness of life's beauty and the acceptance of death lend a glimmer of serenity to the desperate Lisa of Geek The Girl. But already by the second track, "Too Much Space", the sound swells with sadness and regret: a thread of voice embroiders the magnificent melody over soft piano phrases, with the violin moaning in the half-light. Spine-chilling.

Between modern soul and dreamy fantasias, the album moves through extremely shy elegies ("Moon In Hell", "After Monday"), deathly sighs ("Into Oblivion"), enchanted music-boxes ("Golden Cities", "A Seed"), para-ambient pieces (the title track, built on bells, acoustic guitar and faint electronic percussion). The musician poached from classical music instead carves out the sonata of "In The Land Of Faeries", with the piano reverberating obsessively into a vacuum and a vocal that has never sounded so ethereal — almost a chamber version of the Cocteau Twins. When the piano exits the scene, there's also room for folk watercolors ("Wire") or lethargic psych ballads in the vein of Mazzy Star ("Red Thread", with its disarming refrain “Go to hell/ Fuck you/ I love you”). "Except For The Ghosts", meanwhile, is a tribute to Jeff Buckley.

In The Maybe World is an elusive album, only seemingly monochrome. Pauses are rare, but its small discoveries make it more seductive with every listen. A music-box to be unwrapped with care, strictly off-limits to distracted or hasty listeners. Lisa Germano still has so much to say and to teach. In the "world of maybe", that's the only certainty.

With Magic Neighbor (2009), however, the quality dips: much of the material seems written with a pseudo-pedagogical intent that sits awkwardly with her trademark inner conflict, leaving the songs without direction. "To The Mighty One" is split between a vague tribute to late-period solo Bozulich and an overloaded bolero; "Simple", driven by acoustic guitar, retreats into her usual chamber-music trinkets; the lullaby of "The Prince Of Plati" echoes the gloomiest side of Rickie Lee Jones. The charming experiment of "Suli-Mon", with its snake-charmer gait and doubled siren vocals, is an end in itself. "Painting The Doors" flounders in showy sounds without a sharp melody to anchor it.

In any case, the title track and, above all, "Snow" bring back - if only in fleeting touches - that wonderful unease of years past.

What remains at the centre of her world is the Germano-instrument pairing (piano, above all, or acoustic guitar), that big big world she once longed for in the tone of a moved and moving little girl. She may have grown up, even if not entirely aware of it, and her music still serves, once again, as a personal vehicle.

Four more years thus pass before her next work, No Elephants (2013), which sees her move from Young God to Dylan Magierek's Badman. It's a record, wrapped in an unsettling and cryptic cover, that sees her move past the fatigue of her previous effort in favour of a renewed lyrical drive. A record in which words once again become absolute protagonists, and from which a very strong anger emerges, one not matched by the purely musical dimension. Indeed, the opening "Ruminants" already reveals this dichotomy: field recordings of birds, the lightest piano accompaniment, a little electronic dust, and that voice, so fragile, dispensing its own charm with discreet grace.

On the album, in fact, the synergy between meaning and signifier rests on a harsh contrast, one that, despite a shared intent, gives the two completely different expressive shapes. So, set against music that is only seemingly lacking in backbone (but which actually reveals a whole series of precious touches and harmonic variations of great charm) comes a textual weight carrying bitter reflections on the present and on a likely future for humanity - not exactly the rosiest of the possible outcomes.

Lisa turns her gaze away from herself and her loved ones, directing her attention towards the world; the various inserts of recorded animal sounds, given the message the artist is sending, come across like so many desperate distress signals, so many invitations to take a little time to listen to the needs of our planet and try to restore its broken balance. Between the bleating of a distant flock in the hazy piano ballad "...And So On", the buzzing of a swarm of bees playing almost in counterpoint to the expansive Spanish guitar line and mobile phone interference (a venomous allusion to how the entire bee pollination process is thrown into disarray by radiation emitted by phone masts) in "Dance Of The Bees", and that persistent birdsong that escorts us all the way to the end of "Strange Bird" (fittingly), it's as if the entire animal kingdom wanted to join together in chorus to warn humankind against taking a step that could prove fatal.

Deep down, though, the record lets a sense of hope shine through, almost as if this No Elephants wanted to be more of an incantation, so that the greed for Mother Nature's bounty (as the measured crescendo of strings and piano in "Diamonds" seems to underline) and that "diabolic apathy" (described in what is probably the masterpiece track of the whole record, torn between faint doomy undertones and adventurous bursts of electronics) don't end up seriously causing us to stop fighting for a different, hopefully better, tomorrow. Either way, it's plain to see that, with this record too, Lisa Germano, with over twenty highly honourable years of career behind her, is still in a position to issue challenges - to herself and to everyone else.

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