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Dates Appearing: August 3 - 13 Current Release: Tails |
It was during college at Brown University that Lisa came into her own as a songwriter and performer. "I was encouraged to be creative," she remembers. "My freshman roommate, Liz Mitchell, was also a singer. We formed a duo called Liz and Lisa and started playing around campus. I wrote the songs and played guitar and Liz and I sang." Liz and Lisa took everyone by storm, quickly converting legions of students into devoted fans.
As part of her training, Lisa worked in the studio for class credit and also studied music theory. (She continued "learning how to communicate musically" after college as well, beginning voice lessons and later attending Boston's Berklee School of Music for a summer). It wasn't long, though, before Liz and Lisa branched out with shows in Dallas, Boston and New York.
The duo moved to New York after graduation in 1990, put a band together and began playing local clubs. But about a year later, Liz left the group. Lisa continued to work with the band. Then Liz had a change of heart and returned to the fold; the band was restructured, with Lisa formally taking on the role of leader. By then the group was known as Nine Stories, the name a reference to J. D. Salinger's famous collection. The Nine Stories lineup, however, would remain in flux. "Eventually," Lisa says, "Liz and I did decide to go our separate ways."
Soon Nine Stories began working with a new drummer. Says Lisa of that time: "It was rough because I didn't have any money to pay the musicians." Nonetheless, her collaboration with the players continued to develop. "I would write songs on acoustic guitar and then work with the band to create the arrangements based on what I heard in my head," she explains.
A couple of circumstances conspired to make Lisa a solo performer as well: "Our drummer went off to tour with They Might Be Giants, and people had been coming up to me after shows and telling me they wanted to hear my vocals more. Since the band was taking a break, it seemed like a good time for me to get used to playing and singing alone. So I started doing solo acoustic shows."
In the spring of 1992 Lisa teamed up with record producer/engineer Juan Patiņo. Their first effort, The Purple Acoustic Tape, went on to sell thousands of copies at her gigs and proved to be a revealing document of what Lisa could do as a songwriter. "I just wanted to get the songs down as soon as possible," says Lisa. "Later we would record them with a full band."
"I never really thought I had a big dream or vision," she says, looking back at that time. "I was just driven to keep doing music; I just did it and didn't think about it. The drive came so naturally -- this feeling that this was what I had to do. Then I realized that the very motivation to keep going was evidence that I did have a vision after all.
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