In Conversation with Lissie

Lissie speaks to House of Solo about her new album, keeping her home life and music career separate and her recent performance in London.

Acclaimed Midwestern artist Lissie grew up immersed in to a world of music from performing in theatre to joining her parents and grandparents singing in Lutheran church.  The singer would write songs as a way to get noticed but to also share her feelings and collect her thoughts. 

Her fifth studio album Carving Canyons perfectly encapsulates this cathartic urge to share her feelings as Lissie takes the audience on a deeply personal journey through heartbreak and loneliness.

The singer started writing this album following a difficult period in her life following an abrupt breakup with her ex-boyfriend in May 2020, she took the emotions of ‘betrayal’, ‘shock’ and ‘pain’ and translated them into universal songs that everyone can relate to. 

On the breakup, Lissie said: “If it had just been that it would have been different but because of COVID and just seeing the pain of the world and you know, the collective sorrow and shock of that, like what are we even living in this is so surreal.”

The singer took six months to come to terms with the breakup and collect her thoughts before heading to Nashville to start writing.

Lissie said: “I kind of had a nervous breakdown because I couldn’t really see people or work, you know, and so I used that time to just really face myself and do some hard stuff.”

Each song is a poetic snapshot in time as the singer goes through various emotions and stages of grief following her breakup. It is because of this emotional journey that the genre of the album is hard to pinpoint. 

Lissie said: “I give every song the life it wants to have through talking about the emotion and the setting. Then I let the music go where it wants to and not being restrained by a genre and hopefully at the end of the day, it just sounds like me.”

She added: “This album has like an arc of grief and getting through that to the other side to where you start to kind of come alive again.”

Lissie is an independent artist which gives her the freedom and space to write straight from the heart, without feeling rushed by deadlines: “I really only write when I’m bursting at the seams, and it’s such a therapeutic thing to do. These songs become the listeners’ songs too, and hopefully it helps them deal with their emotions as well. It’s all universal.”

The singer currently lives on, manages and converses a vast 45-acre farm in Iowa. Many famous musicians like Led Zeppelin, Kanye West and Genesis have used remote locations like this to unwind and find inspiration to help their creative process when making music. 

However, Lissie takes pride in keeping her home life on the farm separate from her music career. 

She said: “I missed the Midwest part of the United States. I lived in California for 12 years so I kind of liked that I was moving back to an easier pace of life and just to be around people who weren’t musicians and who weren’t in the industry. So my life is very separate from my persona of Lissie and my music.”

Earlier this year, Lissie played a sold-out show in London at LaFayette following last year’s release of ‘Watch Over Me (Early Works 2002-2009)’ and the ‘Anniversary Edition’ of ‘Catching A Tiger’. 

Talking about performing in London, Lissie said: “It was great. I feel very fortunate that I have these listeners and an audience that I feel has really stuck with me from the beginning. I did pretty well with my first record ‘Catching A Tiger’ in the UK and had a lot of opportunities and since then my career has just maintained, it’s not like I’ve gotten to be this giant popstar and nor is that really what I want. 

“I’ve just feel very lucky that people there have stuck with me and to see all these faces in the crowd after years, I just want to cry. It’s like ‘Oh, I know you! I’m glad you’re here, I hope you’re okay.’ It was really sweet, the energy in the room was incredible because we’ve all missed each other. We have missed gatherings, we have missed shows and feeling the energy in a room.”

Lissie has a few shows in Norway lined up before heading to the UK for a selection of in-store shows, starting on 26 September at St John’s Church in Kingston.