By Ed Condran
The Record (Hackensack, NJ) | August 28, 1998
Lisa Germano’s boyfriends never gave her much—except heartache and anxiety. The resourceful singer-songwriter, however, turned years of misery into three dark but compelling albums.
Germano’s major label debut, the sarcastically titled, “Happiness,” included such cheery numbers as “Everyone’s Victim,” “The Darkest Night of All,” and “Sycophant.” The follow-up, 1994’s “Geek the Girl,” was even bleaker. “Cancer of Everything,” “A Guy Like You,” and “Cry Wolf” were inspired by a particularly painful paramour.
But the lovelorn Germano hit her nadir the following year and chronicled every brutal moment on her best album. The black but atmospheric “Excerpts From a Love Circus” summed up yet another tragic period for the former member of the John Mellencamp band.
“I’m not the best judge of character,” Germano said during a telephone interview from Portland, Maine. “I got involved with some of the worst guys and I paid a pretty good price for it. I got some material from it, but that’s about it.”
Those days are over—at least for the moment—since Germano is happy. The soft-spoken songwriter even crafted a relatively upbeat album, “Slide.” Haunting violin lines and funky keyboard augment the pretty material, which includes the optimistic “Betty.”
“The song is about my mom, Betty,” Germano said. “She always could see the good regardless of the situation. I never understood that until recently. It’s weird, but I see the good now.”
The secret to her bliss? “No boyfriend,” Germano said. “The last guy did major damage three years ago, and I’m still dealing with that.”
Germano’s spirits were also buoyed by her move from her longtime home in Bloomington, Ind., to Los Angeles.
“I had a lot of bad memories there,” Germano said. “I had to get out of there. I know people only thought of me as Johnny Cougar’s fiddler.”
“It’s sunny in Los Angeles. I write, I play the guitar, and I have good friends there like Tchad.”
Tchad is Tchad Blake (Soul Coughing, Tom Waits), who produced the recently released “Slide.”
“He did an unbelievable job,” Germano said. “I love the way he mixes sound up. When you listen to his work on headphones, the sound feels like its dripping out of your years. He’s a brilliant producer and he brought in a lot of great musicians like [drummer] Jerry [Marotta] and [guitarist] Joe [Gore]. I can’t say enough about the recording situation. I couldn’t be happier right now.”
Ironically, after enduring so much mental torture, Germano is dealing with physical agony. The diminutive multi-instrumentalist has an ulcer.
“It [stinks],” she said. “I can’t drink coffee or wine anymore and you know that’s a drag.”
Indeed. Germano stressed how much she loves those beverages during the tune “Bruises,” from “Love Circus”: “Coffer in the morning and wine in the evening everything else is boring, boring.”
“I just have to find something else that’s equally bad for me but doesn’t hurt so much,” she said. “…it’s so weird how that I’m healed in one manner that I’m sick in another way. It’s an awful pain that I have to deal with on this tour.”
The jaunt Germano is referring to is “The Suffragette Sessions Tour,” which stops Thursday at Roseland in Manhattan. The concert, which smacks of Bob Dylan’s Rolling Thunder Revue, unites a number of female recording artists, such as Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of the Indigo Girls, who organized the shows, Heart’s Ann Wilson, Jane Siberry, Luscious Jackson’s Kate Schellenbach, and former Breeder Josephine Wiggs. Most members of the collective will perform three of their songs and then back up their peers.
“I’m excited about the possibilities of this tour,” said Germano, the day the tour started. “We have such a great bunch of performers. I think this is going to be a lot of fun for us and the audience.”
This may be the last chance to catch Germano, since she won’t be doing a solo tour.
Featured image: Lisa Germano gave up days of coffee and wine. (Photo: Paul McMenamin)
