By Mike Holtzclaw
Daily Press (Newport News, VA) | August 28, 1998
Lisa Germano acknowledges that her songs are “not music in general that you’d put on at a party.” But she’s getting there.
After four powerful albums that explored the depths of depression, Germano’s newest work, “Slide,” released earlier this month, is coming from a new place. The new material seems to at least recognize peace of mind as a feasible goal, and Germano says that point of view is every bit as autobiographical as her more despondent work.
At age 40, buoyed by the combination of musical catharsis and some good therapy, she says she feels “lighter” than she has in many years. She still hedges her bets—she chose the title of her new album because of the human tendency to backslide rather than continue neatly in a positive direction—but Germano feels she may have turned an important corner in her life.
“On my previous records, I don’t see those songs as ‘poor Lisa,'” she says. “I see them as this poor person trying to get out of that situation. And you have to go through the things in those records to get out of them. If you don’t go through all of that, you don’t get out of it. Hopefully now I’m turning into a good slide.”
While her discs have drawn critical raves, she has been unable to break through commercially. Though she lacks the funds to tour in support of “Slide,” Germano will appear The Boathouse in Norfolk Tuesday as part of the Suffragette Sessions Tour—a traveling collection of female musicians from disparate genres, brought together by Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls.
In a press release, Ray describes the 11-date tour—a cross between Lilith Fair and Bob Dylan’s legendary Rolling Thunder Revue of the late ’70s—as “a sociliast experiment in rock and roll, with no hierarchy and no boundaries.”
Germano has done some impressive session work on recent Indigo Girls albums, and she was among the first musicians they contacted last April about joining the tour. She will play violin, mandolin and piano.
In preparation for the tour, each musician selected three of her own songs to be played by the group during the tour. The songs were compiled on tapes and sent out to each performer; after a week or two of familiarizing themselves with the songs, the women gathered in New York for three quick days of rehearsals before embarking on the tour.
“I don’t think” Ray and Saliers “want everything to be too figured out,” Germano says. “I think the idea is for it to be pretty loose and fun.”
She hopes the exposure from this tour will generate some interest in “Slide.” This album creates the same sort of moody, melodic atmosphere that distinguished such earlier discs as “Geek the Girl,” but its more upbeat themes make it more accessible to radio programmers and a broader listening audience.
A few months ago, she received a letter from a fan who had been inspired by Germano’s songs about dealing with depression. The young woman sent along some of her own poetry, detailing her experiences with rape and molestation.
“I’ve never been through that,” Germano says, “but there was so much anger in her words that I could relate to. I wrote her and said: ‘I know what it’s like to feel so bad, even though I’m not there anymore. I know hyou can get out of this somehow.’
“I sent her an advance copy of ‘Slide,’ and said, ‘This might be way too positive for you, but I wanted to share it.’ That’s what’s important to me: I want people to hear it.”
