HOLD THAT TIGER Lissie
Jan 11, 2011
As her Catching A Tiger tour gets ready to restart for the new year, the songstress still has the musical world by the tail.
BY NANCY DUNHAM
If you just zeroed in on Lissie's performance at the last 2010 Lilith Fair date in Washington, D.C., you might have thought she was performing in front of an amphitheatre-size crowd, not on a side stage in front of a few hundred. Forget that temperatures and humidity both hovered near triple digits on that August day; Lissie and her band gave all out head thumping, hard charging, guitar banging performances as they worked their way through a 30-minute set.
"This is a nice crowd," she said to the assembled group midway through her performance. "We're getting to evening now. I want to see some dancing. No excuses."
Although Lissie only performed at one Lilith Fair event and was one of the least well-known performers on the Lilith Tour - which included such household names as Lilith founder Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, the Indigo Girls, and Grace Potter - she was arguably one of the Washington show's brightest lights.
Lucky for the U.S. she remembered to come home.
Ever since June when her debut album Catching a Tiger was released in the U.K, her world has been full of sold-out shows, musician jams and songwriting collaborations.
"Everything is going so great. It's really, really thrilling," she said from the U.K. just before her Lilith performance. "I came over here last winter and did some shows in London. They went well but there wasn't much buzz. Now my shows are sold out, they play me on the radio, there are posters of my face all over the city. Really good things are happening."
Tough to imagine a year ago the Rock Island, Illinois native had just released her Americana EP Why You Runnin. Although that EP was lush, set to an acoustic/rock/indie folk musical background, the debut album is even richer and more emotive.
Credit that to her ever-growing musical prowess plus her collaboration with the two producers she worked with on this album that was released in the U.S. in August - Jacquire King and Bill Reynolds, who also produced Lissie's EP.
"Jacquire insists on perfection in certain ways. I would sing and sing and sing and sing until he thought he had everything he needed to work with. He wanted to push me to learn and challenge me. He brings a total professional and credibility to the project with his passion and how good he is at it," she says noting his multiple Grammy Awards. "Bill and I had been friends...and usually he liked what I did enough that I would only sing once or twice. He said, 'After you sing it [a few times] you start losing the emotion'...Maybe there were a few notes that could have been sung better, but the emotion is what he goes for."
It's easy to see how Lissie, as an artist, is something of a mix of those two styles. She's a perfectionist, writing new songs for the album even though she already had more than 30 from which to choose. She's also all about the emotion, as evidenced by the clear passion she brings to her playing and vocals.
"I think sometimes even comes down to something like I love that song and I almost think I have it but I haven't done it quite right. That's when I will put it aside for the next album," she says. "The truth, too, in talking about it now is that I didn't start out to make an album in a way I thought I was being intentional and deliberate. I didn't over think it. It worked out."
Lissie's latest leg on the Catching A Tiger tour starts this weekend, on Jan 15, in Los Angeles. Tour dates at her official website.
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