By Susan Moll
Stomp and Stammer | July 2003
Long before Cat Power wondered what would the community think and Beth Orton discovered her central reservation, there was a girl from Indiana with a vivid Italian lineage and a sweet gig as John Cougar Mellencamp’s fiddle player. But after his lonesome jubilee died down, she began cultivating one of her own. That’s when things went wrong. She began writing songs that came out steeped in misery—transmissions from a Hoosier forever on the brink of a breakdown.
Angry and dumb (but not too cool), she poured out her heart for the shattered, the shat-upon, the fucked-up, and the fucked-over; though she didn’t need for a prayer. While Liz Phair fucked and ran and Polly Jean Harvey came up man-size, Germano weathered bruises, bruises, bruises, bruises, occasionally pausing from her malaise to record an affectionate paean to one of her beloved cats. The sycophant, the beautiful schizophrenic, the emotional wench, the inconsiderate bitch—and of course, the geek—she proclaimed, with all the self-flagellating bravado she could possibly muster, “I am everyone’s victim.”
But not today. Judging from her light-spirited demeanor, two days before she takes off for Europe, it’s impossible to believe Lisa Germano is capable of summoning the kind of never-ending anguish that permeates her songs. “I’m a really hyper person. I try real hard to be positive.” She laughs. “I’m very, very happy. I try to be. I think it helps me to get this shit out, y’see? I think I connect with the world when I do it.”
Whether plunging headlong into an alienated girl’s soul (Geek the Girl), wading through tides of disillusionment (Happiness) or tackling that four-letter word beginning with L (Excerpts From a Love Circus), Germano always manages to establish a penetrating sense of intimacy with the listener, allowing them to peer into her psyche as they would a kaleidoscope. Though each hesitant vocal wisp seems to transmute emotional fragility, she’s as solid as Indiana limestone. Regardless of the theme at hand, her songs consistently stem from “a real need to just cry, I think. And sometimes not crying for sadness, just crying for the beauty of something, or crying for the world,” she elaborates. “So many times, people feel lonely and they need stuff to envelop them. I think that’s important—to connect as artists, and as people.”
Ironically, making an album was the last thing on Germano’s mind when the songs on Lullaby For Liquid Pig (Ineffable/iMUSIC) began to develop. Understandably traumatized by her split with longtime home 4AD, who released her last outing, Slide, in 1998, Germano threatened to curtail her musical career altogether. When, instead of dabbling in new material, she corralled previously released cut for Concentrated and funneled unreleased B-sides, alternate takes and other effluvia into the sardonically-titled Rare, Unusual or Just Bad Songs, it looked as though she meant to make good on that promise. (Both outings, incidentally, are available through lisagermano.com). It’s when Germano was preoccupied with other peoples’ endeavors—tours with the eels, Neil Finn’s 7 Worlds Collide and One All LPs, David Bowie’s Heathen—that her own began to take root.
“One of the main reasons I keep puttin’ records out is because when people say they connect with my music, it’s usually at a really deep level,” she confides. “So then I feel it’s about them, and I like that.”
When she wasn’t biding her time behind the counter at Book Soup, a literary alcove on L.A.’s Sunset Strip that happily bills itself “bookseller to the great and infamous,” Germano was at home writing and recording songs that were never intended to surface in the context of an album.
“When I came up with the title I start to like it,” she remembers. “I was just calling it Liquid Pig for a while, and it was more angry and more sarcastic. But then I kept writing more of these more lullaby-kind of songs. They were sleepy and they weren’t angry; they weren’t rockish. And then I came with Lullaby for Liquid Pig, and I really started to like that because that’s what the record started to feel like. And then the songs started to make sense together, like that they were some sort of lullaby when you can’t sleep. Your eyes are wide awake because you’re seeing all this shit in the middle of the night. It just started to make sense.”
When the songs reached dead ends, Germano recruited Joey Waronker, to whom she was referred by eels drummer Butch Norton. “I called him out of the blue and he was so nice—we totally hit it off,” she recalls. “Once we put it to ProTools at his house he wanted to bring his friend Jamie (Candiloro) in, who worked with R.E.M.. So us three would just get together and play and experiment. Then we added some people to the original tracks. It never really got that far from where it was—it just sounded better. It was kinda magical puttin’ other people on it.”
That magic, especially when supplied by Johnny Marr (who created tinkly guitar textures for the hearttrending “Paper Doll”) and Neil Finn (who lent optigan to “Into the Night”), bred devastating beauty. “Liquid Pig”‘s squalling dissonance sounds instantly familiar to anyone who’s stumbled down a pitch-dark hallway in a drunken haze, desperately fumbling for a light switch, the phone or a receptacle in which to toss cookies.
Though Germano casts a reflective eye on liquid intoxicants on tracks like “Candy,” “It’s Party Time,” and “Pearls,” there’s more to Liquid Pig than that.
“It’s way more deeper,” Germano insists. “A song like ‘Paper Doll’ isn’t about alcohol. It’s about why the same type of a person who would allow their friend to take such advantage of them; it’s the same type of person who would let alcohol take advantage of them. It’s a concept album about behavior that you need to change. I’m not denying that some of the songs are about alcohol—i just think it’s about behavior.”
With Liquid Pig’s focus on such a negative facet of human behavior, it’s hard to believe its creator is as chipper as she is now. “For two years that I was writing these songs, I don’t think I was feeling particularly happy,” Germano admits. “But once I started making it a record, even though it seems like kind of a sad record; I was just having a ball! I loved it.”
“These things are gifts when they come. They’re gifts. You don’t always know if it’s going to turn into a song, or if that song’s going to be on a record, or whatever. It doesn’t matter because it just has to happen.”
Don’t give up your dream. It’s really all you have.
Featured Image: Lisa Germano (Photo: James Frank Dean)
