By Tom Lanham
Pulse! | August 1993
“I’ll probably get depressed by the end of the day, but I feel good right now.” Lisa Germano has worries, lots of ’em, the most pressing of which is finding a new place to live. The volatile young violinist just vacated a snug New Orleans hideaway to return to her native Bloomington, Ind., for a recording session with John Mellencamp. Plus she has a new Capitol solo album to promote, a dusky document of despair with the upbeat title of Happiness. “And it’s so funny that it’s called Happiness,” she says, “because it was complete torture to make.”
For a good portion of her life, Germano explains, gloom enshrouded her daily. She had stifled her passion for music in a sedate Midwestern marriage, and—as her psychiatrist brother finally diagnoses—was slowly sinking into a serious depressed. She looks back on those days almost lightheartedly: “I cried all the time—I was trying so hard to be normal, but I failed bad. And that’s where I leared this ‘victim’ attitude that I write about.”
If Germano’s moodier moments like “Puppet,” “Sycophant,” “Bad Attitude” and “Everyone’s Victim” sound torn from a tortured diary—surprise, they are. Part of her therapy has been keeping a daily journal, “And I would’ve never written any lyrics if I didn’t write in my diary,” she says. “I write down exactly what I’m feeling, and I always put little poems in the back. And if you can actually verbalize all your feelings, that’s how you come up with songs that really have your feelings in them.”
Germano sings her painful paeans in a fluttery, childlike persona—picture Suzanne Vega squeezed by giant anaconda coils—even on a surreal marching rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’.”
But it’s her way with a bow that really breaks the ice. On her first indie issue, On the Way Down From the Moon Palace, she banked the strings with spoons. On Happiness, Germano alternately plucks, strums, strokes and batters her instrument, creating a Pink Floyd spaciness one minute and a hypnotic hoedown from Hell the next.
“I look at the violin as a color—it doesn’t have to be played a violin,” she says with a girlish giggle. Coming from a small town, she thinks, has allowed her the luxury of “being a little weird.” For the song “Sycophant” she “just dug that bow into the strings—schreech!—and that has a lot more emotion than happy violin lines,” she says. “On ‘Everyone’s Victim’ we put the violin through an amp that made it very distorted and ended up with a Middle Eastern feel.”
In Germano’s world, the dark clouds are lurking inside the silver linings. In the perky “You Make Me Want to Wear Dresses,” she pleads with a lover to “Take me to your castle / It feels so good in there / Much, much safer in your castle / Mine got lost somewhere.” “Oh no, they’re not happy lyrics,” the author corrects. “Whenever I’ve been in love, I’ve always felt vulnerable, really lost in the relationship. So instead of being strong, you’d rather wear dresses and think about nothing, you know, ‘Take care of me because I can’t take care of myself.'”
The album was produced in New Orleans by mood maestro Malcolm Burn. And Germano admints it’s a far cry from the work she does for mentor Mellencamp, who added the rookie to his “Scarecrow” tour several years ago and continues to feature her fiddle in most of his projects. She’s also gone on to tour or record with U2, Indigo Girls, Billy Joel, and Simple Minds. Not bad for a 34-year old who once told herself, “Lisa, you’re not gonna play music and you’re be miserable for the rest of your life!”
Is her current lot an improvement? “Yeah, but I’m still homeless,” Germano whines. “And I’ve got this huge promotional tour coming up, and I’ve got to go apartment hunting, and I really miss New Orleans, and, oh, I just know I never should’ve adopted that cat…”
Featured Image: Violin femme, Lisa Germano (Photo: Pamela Springsteen)