In the Maybe World

A record about honoring death and seeing life.
Seems like a last record… but feels like a new beginning.

Released in July 2006 by Young God Records, In the Maybe World is Lisa Germano’s seventh studio album and arguably her most cohesive work of ambient dream-folk. With minimalist instrumentation, fragile vocals, and elliptical lyrics, the record feels like it was made to soundtrack the in-between spaces of life—the moments of disconnection, memory, and slow reckoning. The album peaked at No. 3 on Billboard’s Top New Age Albums chart, becoming Germano’s biggest chart showing in the US, and “Red Thread” became a college radio hit.

Following the soft melancholy of Lullaby for Liquid Pig, Germano continued working under the wing of Michael Gira’s Young God Records. Germano has described the album as the result of “trying to write my way out of feeling bad about death,” and it plays like a companion piece to grief. Despite the heaviness of the themes, there’s a warmth to the record—a strange lightness that hints at peace through surrender.

The period between Lullaby for Liquid Pig (2003) and In the Maybe World was one of transition and creative recalibration for Germano. The ARTISTdirect label that had released Liquid Pig went under shortly after, a setback she found upsetting but less devastating than it might have been earlier in her career. She continued working at Book Soup, an independent bookstore in West Hollywood, a job that allowed her to pay bills while letting her music develop organically, without pressure from contracts or release schedules. In an LA Times interview, she described having reached a kind of acceptance about her place in the industry, saying she was no longer an artist in the music business—she was just a person who made music.

The songs on In the Maybe World emerged gradually, without a deliberate plan to make a record. Death began asserting itself as a subject through a series of events: her father underwent successful open heart surgery, her beloved cat Miamo-Tutti died, and she found herself drawn to the story of Jeff Buckley’s drowning nearly a decade earlier. Germano described it as trying to write her way out of a rut of grief and fear, noting that the cat songs she wrote weren’t really about cats dying but about learning to love life by confronting its ending. Even the song about Buckley, which she originally thought too personal, eventually became less about him specifically and more about letting go.

Meanwhile, Michael Gira—who had long admired Germano’s work—offered her a home on Young God Records, the label he’d founded after dissolving Swans. The label had recently become known for releasing artists like Devendra Banhart and Angels of Light. For Germano, the fit was comfortable and low-pressure. Though Gira did suggest some changes to the album’s track sequencing, the experience was unusually collaborative for someone who was, by her own admission, fiercely stubborn about song order. She later said it was the first time she’d been open to changing a sequence, because she respected Gira and agreed with his suggestions.

In the Maybe World was largely self-produced by Germano, recorded over the course of roughly two years in her Los Angeles home studio. Her process was characteristically solitary—she worked primarily alone, often late at night, building songs around piano, violin, and odd keyboard textures. When she grew frustrated with her home recordings—unsure if what she had was workable or needed to be scrapped entirely—she brought the material to Jamie Candiloro, who transferred everything to ProTools. Candiloro and drummer Joey Waronker listened through the raw recordings and assured her the takes worked, then helped clean up the sound while preserving its intimate, lo-fi character. In her words, some tracks had complete hiss on them, but rather than scrubbing everything clean, the team would decide whether the imperfections should stay.

The album’s instrumental palette is notably spare. Piano serves as the lead instrument throughout, accompanied by Germano’s violin, various keyboard parts, and occasional guitar. Guest contributions came through remote collaboration—a process Germano found rewarding despite her general dislike of the digital world. Johnny Marr played guitar on “Into Oblivion” and “Wire,” contributing with a restrained touch that the LA Times described as playing a handful of notes as softly as possible. Craig Ross played guitar on “Golden Cities” and also mixed the album. Sebastian Steinberg added bass on four tracks, and Joey Waronker provided drums on three. Brady Michaels contributed guitar on “Too Much Space.” The engineering was handled by Jim Spencer, and the album was distributed by Revolver USA.

Germano introduced the new material during a weekly residency at Spaceland, a club in LA’s Silver Lake neighborhood, in the spring of 2006. Accompanied by her own piano and electric guitar with Patrick Warren on pump organ and Steinberg on bass, the live performances wove together songs from Liquid Pig and previews of the new album.

Themes

Germano described In the Maybe World as her “death album,” though she was quick to note that the record was ultimately about deliverance as much as loss. Death appears throughout the album in various forms—physical, spiritual, relational—but Germano’s approach is less about mourning and more about trying to understand the space between being alive and not. In interviews, she pushed back against the assumption that the album was depressing, telling an audience at Spaceland that she didn’t think it was, drawing uncertain laughs.

Several songs have specific autobiographical roots. “Too Much Space” was written during her father Rocco’s heart surgery, imagining the worst while he was ultimately fine. “Golden Cities” is an elegy for her cat Miamo-Tutti, whose death she described as both awful and magical. “Except for the Ghosts” was written for Jeff Buckley, though the song—which she’d held onto for nearly a decade—evolved beyond its original subject into something more universal about impermanence and release. Michael Gira’s encouragement was key to its inclusion; Germano had previously considered it too personal for a record.

“Moon in Hell” has a similar history—it was originally written during the Liquid Pig sessions but shelved because Germano felt it was too self-absorbed. She changed her mind after playing it for a friend who was living with people struggling with drug addiction; he heard his own experience in it, which helped her see the song as bigger than herself. This tension—between the intensely personal and the unexpectedly universal—runs throughout the album and reflects Germano’s growing understanding of how her music functioned. She came to see her songs as operating like fairy tales: coded messages with something deeper underneath, which is why different listeners could find completely different meanings in the same piece.

The album’s most bracing moment is “Red Thread,” whose chorus consists of the unvarnished back-and-forth of a deteriorating relationship. Germano sings both sides of the argument, moving from civil discussion to raw hostility and eventually arriving at a resigned exchange of affection. Multiple critics singled it out as the album’s emotional centerpiece. The title track, by contrast, is one of the record’s most elusive pieces—brief, dreamlike, and almost pop-like in structure, floating between yearning and acceptance.

Germano also resisted the idea that she was a songwriter in the conventional sense, preferring to call herself a storyteller. She described being unable to write on demand and needing songs to come from genuine emotional necessity. Some lines sat unfinished for years before finding their place. It was an approach fundamentally at odds with the discipline-based writing that some of her peers practiced, but it gave her work an organic quality that listeners responded to—even if, as she noted with characteristic dry humor, it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing you’d recommend to a friend at a party.

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No.	Title	Length
1	The Day	1:51
2	Too Much Space	2:53
3	Moon in Hell	3:29
4	Golden Cities	2:53
5	Into Oblivion	4:10
6	In the Land of Fairies	2:38
7	Wire	1:35
8	In the Maybe World	2:09
9	Red Thread	3:35
10	A Seed	1:54
11	Except for the Ghosts	3:01
12	After Monday	3:20

	Label	Format	Catalog No.	Country	Year
	Young God	CD	YG32	US	2006
	Young God	CD Promo	YG32	US	2006

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Press Release

I am incredibly proud and pleased to announce the release of Lisa Germano’s new album on Young God Records. I have been a fan of Lisa’s music for years. Her songs are impossibly poignant and often heartbreakingly beautiful. She’s a great lyricist and singer but also an extremely talented multi-instrumentalist.

She plays violin, piano/keyboards and guitar with equal authority, as well as producing her own records with great imaginative effect – the result is seductive and truly magical. No one sounds like her. You get the feeling you’re walking through her dreams as you listen. The intensity of feeling in her singing is a little frightening sometimes – it’s like she’s singing very close to your ear, leading you through her ultra emotional world. It’s a place I very much enjoy visiting, and I hope you will too.

Lisa began releasing her music in the 90’s, first on Capitol Records, and then several more albums through 4AD. Perhaps most notable among them were the fantastic Geek, The Girl, and Excerpts From A Love Circus. These records created a very special “antique”, lost carnival atmosphere – extremely personal, simultaneously self-effacing and confrontational missives of emotional damage and impossible love. She received a fair amount of acclaim at the time in publications ranging from independent-oriented fanzines and magazines and on to Spin, Rolling Stone, etc. In 2003 Lisa released the absolutely beautiful and wrenching audio journey Lullaby For Liquid Pig, featuring woozy paeans to alcohol, fantasy landscapes and out-of-focus dreams. Her side projects/collaborations include the album OP8 (with Giant Sand and Calexico) in which she is the featured singer, and diverse hired side-person stints with David Bowie, Neil Finn, John Mellencamp, Simple Minds, Iggy Pop, Sheryl Crow and others. As an artist/performer, in my opinion, she’s right up there with the cadre of strong, emotionally raw challenging and original women singers such as PJ Harvey, Maryanne Faithful, Cat Power and Bjork, and it’s about time Lisa had her due. in the maybe world features some of Lisa’s best songs to date. Typically, her (self) production and arrangements are inventive and completely unique, the words cut right to the core and her voice carries you gently off into a world where the distinctions between beauty, loss, love and pain tend to blur. The songs are immediately gratifying and sensual, but are also ultimately complicated and reward repeated listening. I hope you enjoy the music!

— Michael Gira, Young God Records

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