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In The City Of Angels
LISA GERMANO
by Lorenzo Casaccia, 2002 ©
"Would you rather sit in the sunshine or in the shadows?". "It doesn't matter.
They are both fine with me".
We are sitting down in a nice coffee shop for a brief interview and, in its
own way, Lisa Germano's answer can't help but sounding as an accidental paraphrasis
of her own music, balancing between a dark philosphy of feminine behaviors and
psychological mechanisms and a progressive folk in the wake of the early Joni
Mitchell and Van Morrison.
It is a sunny and lazy August afternoon in Melrose, in the heart of Los Angeles,
and Lisa's new record,"Lullaby For A Liquid Pig" is due in a few weeks (it has
been delayed since then) on the brand new label Ineffable.
In front of a couple of lattes, we talked about Calexico and Beck, about being
an American in Los Angeles and a foreigner in America.
She was tired. "I am moody" she said, "I have not been sleeping well. I don't
know..."
How long have you lived in Los Angeles?
It is five years now.
Why Los Angeles? One thing that immediately comes out from your records
is the fact that they are "personal" and they have a sense of "intimacy". I
could say the same, for example, for an artist like Juliana Hatfield who yet
is musically different from you. But both of you moved to Los Angeles that on
the other side is considered one of the most superficial cities...
It is a big joke! Everybody here that is superficial knows that they are being
superficial. It is all a big Hollywood-style kind of joke. You meet really good
people here. And the weather is good. If I am correct about Juliana, we both
come from cold places.
I come from Indiana, you know. When you live in the winter for 30 years, 40
years, it's really nice to be in the sun. I love the sun. I wake up in the morning
and it is sunny and I go "God, this is great!". I bet you feel similar about
it! And you always meet a lot of people here that do what you do. So the superficial
stuff is just a name, unless you want to play that game you don't even notice
it. I mean, I don't.
Where do you hang out in L.A.
I don't go out a lot. I am rather a homey kind of person.
Do you manage to live out of your music?
No, I work at an indipendent bookstore! One of the few indipendent bookstores
around. It reminds me a lot of the music business. We have a lot of authors
that come in and look for their own book and... we don't have it! It's just
like when you go to a record store and you look for your own CD and then they
don't have it.
Like when you have a record nearly coming out and you have a lot of reviews
and press and you can't find the record. That's the difficult part, to get you
stuff out and available. There's so many books. So many records.
Your new record is not on 4AD as the previous ones.
No, I have not been on 4AD for 3 years, since Slide came out. It is coming out
on Ineffable. It's a new label and I am the first artist on it so it's kind
of an experiment. The important thing is that the guy who runs it really understands.
It is going to be a difficult record, I think that a lot of people will like
it. I think that people that are going to like it are going to really like it.
It's kind of sad and a lot of people just don't like sad anymore. For example,
the new Peter Gabriel record or the new Beck record are going to be really beautiful,
but the reviews on Rolling Stone were like "it was to depressing to listen to
it".
Now the reviews have all become this you-gotta-be-cool stuff.
How long have you been working at the last record. How do you work on your
records?
I have been working on it for 2 1/2 - 3 years. But it really came together in
January of this year, when I put it out with my friends, with my guitar player
and my bass player. Actually I had decided to do that the autumn before but
they all live in different parts of the US and when I was going to fly them
here using all ym frequent flyer miles, September 11 happened and I did not
want to fly anybody anywhere. Actually I did not want to fly anywhere myself.
And after that I started using ProTools which is really convenient because you
can send stuff to other people.
The production of Tchad Blake in the last record was really particular.
Can you tell me something more about it? Why you did not work with him for this
record?
Because I did not have any money. At all. For Slide it was 4AD who paid. This
one I made it at home, as I did Geek The Girl. Then since I made some money
last year by touring with Neil Finn I started working on it with my friends
and we put it on ProTools. And then it started costing me money, and I ended
up spending all my money on it.
The fact is not that I don't have any record deal so I don't have money. No.
It's that I don't have any money. I am not the kind of artist that wants
to make every song sound the same. Every song must have its own mood and Tchad
was very good in helping me doing that.
How much did your other records sell?
Not very much. The first one sold 30,000 because it was on Capitol. Then the
others kept decreasing. around 10-20,000. Slide sold 6,000. 4AD had to drop
me because I was not selling records. I mean, we are all friends but they cannot
put money on you if you are not selling records. It all has to do with media
and publicity.
When Geek The Girl came out it really had good reviews on Rolling Stone and
on Spin, but the record was anavailable, you conld not find it anywhere. And
then the next week it came out but it was too late.
Are you happy with you career? Do you regret anything that happened or
not happened at the right time?
No. I am one of those people that figure that if you did try your best did what
you could then things'll happen in the way they are supposed to be happening.
But it would be nice to mke enough money so that I could get a health insurance,
or things like that. I am just glad that the people that like my record like
them.
A couple of weeks ago I played at Largo and at the end there were two people
who were crying afterwards. It kind of made me sad and happy at the same time,
because I am glad that it connected but perhaps I wished it didn't because it
was kind of sad and this person was surely living something sad. But it makes
me feel worthwhile.