By Marc D. Allan
The Indianapolis Star | July 25, 1993
As her big day finally approaches. Lisa Germano has mixed feelings.
Germano, the Bloomington-based violinist best known for ner work in ohn Mellencamp’s band, has spent the last six months waiting for her first solo album for Capitol Records to be released. Six months wondering whether audiences will want to share her charmingly quirky first-person songs about relationships. Six months agonizing over the decisions she’d made during the recording.
The release date for the ironically titled Happiness is finally set for Tuesday. But during several days in New York to promote the record, Germano found Capitol in a state of upheaval. The record company has new owners, and several of her supporters at the label had just been given two hours’ notice to pack up and get out.
“I just want the record out,” she says in a telephone interview. “I did this press dinner and this guy said, ‘I heard your record in the winter. It must be like being pregnant for 2 1/2 years.’ I think that was pretty good. It’s exactly true.”
Ain’t life fun?
Germano wrestles with that question on Happiness. When she’s happy and in love, she sings You Make Me Wanto Wear Dresses and Cowboy (“I love my little cowboy/when he laughs, I’m happy/when I’m weak, he’s macho/we ride off together”).
When she’s sad or feeling manipulated, she’s Everyone’s Victim or a Puppet (“If I was a puppet/then we’d get along just fine.”)
Emotional wench
Not for nothing does Germano call herself “the emotional wench.” But even when the relationship part of her life isn’t fun, her working life is.
Since joining Mellencamp’s band for the Scarecrow tour, her career has been a rapid succession of high-profile work with Mellencamp, Billy Joel, Bob Seger and Simple Minds.
Spurred by Mellencamp’s request that she write a song for his film Falling From Grace (she had two songs on the soundtrack), Germano began writing her own material.
In May 1991, she released her first solo album, the self-financed On the Way Down from the Moon Palace. (Indianapolis-based Egg Records will reissue the record next month.) Moon Palace received several rave reviews and sold more than 10,000 copies—after an initial pressing of 1,000 discs and 500 tapes.
Capitol signed Germano as a solo artist on the strength of that showing. She started recording Happiness shortly after Mellencamp’s Whenever We Wanted tour ended last summer, finishing the album in January.
“When I made that first record,” she says, “I had other problems—like making decisions—just because I had never done it before. But there was something about it that it was in my control more, which gave you a sense of ‘My God, I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m making decisions.’ So, at the end of the day, it was a really good feeling.”
“Whereas with this one, right now, it’s a good feeling, but there were different problems. The decisions you make, they aren’t all your decisions. You don’t own this record; you have a relationship with the record company.”
“So instead of ‘Man, it’s so hard to make the decisions,’ it’s more like you need to pretend that you know exactly what you’re talking about and be absolutely clearer than clear.”
From the earliest demo tapes to the final product, Germano kept much of her vision intact. She acquiesced to some record-company demands, such as releasing a pop-oriented version of You Make Me Wanto Wear Dresses as a single, while insisting that the version she likes appears on the disc.
Waiting for release
One area she couldn’t control was the release date. Happiness has idled at Capitol, but reviewers have been listening to the record for month.
Charles M. Young, writing in Playboy magazine, said: “She can hypnotize you and make you think. The fiddle still knocks you out.”
In the Detroit News, Kevin Ransom called it “an intriguing, truly remarkable record.”
Already, too, Germano’s getting airply on “adult alternative” radio stations, including WTTS-FM (92.3) in Bloomington. And there’s a video for Dresses that she planned to edit last week.
But she doesn’t know what to expect from here. Mellencamp has a new album, Human Wheels, scheduled for release in September. If he tours, she wants to be included. If he doesn’t, she wants to take a band on the road to play clubs, probably as an opening act.
Now that the waiting is just about over, Germano looks back and thinks the major-label experience was better than she expected. As long as she kept focused on what she wanted, she says, everything went well.
“You have to be stronger than you think,” she says. “If you are, they will do what you want. There was a lot of disagreement on things, but at the end of the day, I got a record I absolutely love. And they have one they all loved, except they all just got fire.”
Featured Image: Busy Musician: Lisa Germano has worked with John Mellencamp, Billy Joel, Bob Seger, and Simple Minds.
