By Helen Metella
Edmonton Journal | March 1, 1992
“Nothing will ever be that hard again,” says Lisa Germano about her debut tour as John Mellencamp’s fiddle player back in 1986.
“It was too much. I wasn’t prepared for it and my husband was having a real hard time about it. The guys in the band didn’t want me there because there wasn’t a violin on anything yet. John had a vision to use it in the future and he thought a tour would be a good opportunity to work it in. All the sound people and roadies were walking around saying, ‘I hate the violin, what’s it doing here?” I used to go to John’s dressing room every night and cry.
Things eventually did get better, although it took a divorce, a period of therapy and two acclaimed albums featuring Germano’s input (Lonesome Jubilee and Big Daddy) before she was convinced that her idiosyncratic and inventive contributions were special.
She’s since played on dises by Bob Seeger and Simple Minds and is an integral part of the Mellencamp show which stops in Edmonton Tuesday.
But better than that, she’s become a formidable solo artist, basking in the glow of rave reviews for her album, exhilarating independent album, On the Way Down from the Moon Palace.
On the phone from a Mellencamp date in Vancouver last week, the 33-year-old Germano talked frankly about the insecurities she airs so openly on her confessional, yet avant garde debut disc.
“I quit playing music for three years when I was 21 to punish myself because I wasn’t doing what I wanted. I used my marriage as an excuse because I was afraid to pursue music. That was before I realized that you make your own choices. That’s a lot of what I write about now.”
Among the most striking of her songs is Riding My Bike, a starkly written piece dense with atmosphere that recalls an incident from her childhood when was followed by a pedophile. The title tune is about the strange plane inhabited by women who live to please their men.
While lyrically provocative, Germano’s disc is also fascinating for the unorthodox sounds she pulls from the many instruments she plays, which include mandolin, piano, accordion and autoharp.
Her renegade sensibilities are what prompted the daughter of two symphony musicians to abandon a decade of classical studies and take up with bluegrass and swing bands at age 18. So did her love of Irish, Cajun and blues and her frequently vocalized admiration for the eccentric experimentation of multi-instrumentalist David Lindley.
All of that sufficiently intrigued Canadian Malcolm Burn (best known as Daniel Lanois’ engineer) to sign on as producer of Germano’s upcoming disc, which will be released by Capitol Records.
“We’re both feel players. Neither of us sees our technique as the goal. Our goal is to do something that feels good, or bad or intense. And we both do unusual sounds. Our vocals aren’t, but our other sounds are unusual.”
Germano’s zest for the unusual is also what captivated Kenny Aronoff, the Mellencamp band drummer who met Germano while she was playing in Nashville, Indiana’s Little Nashville Opry House. He mentioned her to Mellencamp and started the chain of events that both changed her life and lately offered her something of a respite from the soul-baring therapy she records on her own.
“My stuff is so intense that this (tour) is like a wonderful vacation. But I’m also getting to play stuff I wrote. It’s another part of my identity, but the fun part. On my stuff I don’t have fun, except for the deep sense of ‘oh it felt so good to get that out.”
