By Alyssa Katz
SPIN | December 1996
Roberta Flack needed a boyfriend to do it, but Lisa Germano kills herself softly in song after song. “He’s happy—I suck,” goes one line on her new album, Excerpts From a Love Circus. “A lot of people hear my music and think I’m really fucked-up,” she observes bluntly. “And I can be. The only thing that hurts my feelings is if they feel sorry for me.” Germano’s songs see each day as a new bruise, conclude from a Victoria’s Secret catalog that she’s too ugly to be loved. She couldn’t be more wrong, but that’s exactly the point: Germano sends us postcards from inside her head, where it’s been raining for a long, long time.
An unassuming sprite even at 38, Germano nervously introduces herself with a too-intimate hug, then explains apologetically five minutes later that it’s a habit she recently picked up at band rehearsals in Austin. As on her records, she sounds like a precocious little girl getting over a cold. In New York City for a brief visit, she’d like nothing more than to check out some live belly dancers, maybe add a few moves to her own repertoire now that she’s taking lessons back home in Bloomington, Indiana.
Alas, none are to be found, Tuesday evidently being a traditional night off for navels. So she suggests our seeking diversion in a psychic reading. “I have my moon in Scorpio. That’s not a great thing.” Behind a curtain storefront there’s no ready to be found, only three children chasing after one another, vying to draw first blood; the youngest, a toddler in nothing but diapers, is bawling piteously. We’re unquestionably in Lisa Germano territory.
For her therapy session of a last album, Geek the Girl, Germano notoriously built a track (“Psychopath”) around an actual call to a women’s crisis center—the terrified voice of a woman who ended up being raped by an intruder. Far from an exploitation, the tape expressed something deeply personal for Germano: She had been stalked by a man who became obsessed with her during the unlikely previous phase of her career, when she was a fiddle player touring with John Mellencamp.
“He was in a psychiatric hospital for beating up somebody because God told him I was at this guy’s house,” she explains resignedly. “When he got out after two years, he called me again. I just couldn’t sleep, ever. I was sure that if I feel asleep, he’d know.” Germano kept a baseball bat next to her bed, and even now sometimes has trouble drifting off.
Geek the Girl, a horror-movie soundtrack haunted by Germano’s brooding, sickly violin, left her nowhere to go but into the daylight. Excerpts From a Love Circus exists in the same dreamy soundscape, but this time you can distinctly hear Germano smiling through her pall of sound. “I kept having trouble with it because it sounded, like, happier.” Amid the airily dissonant atmospherics, the record has a few drumbeats to keep things moving and—just grant this one to the lady—odes to her two cats. Still, bad ex-boyfriends pollute the scenery; in a line taken from real life, one snidely tells her, “You’re not my Yoko Ono.” For Excerpts From a Love Circus, Germano brought in a few producer, after breaking up—in both ways—with the man she had collaborated with on her previous three records.
Germano grew up in Mishawaka, Indiana, studying classical violin with the encouragement of her musician parents. Her early 20s were marked by a failed marriage (“We were too young”) and a three-year bout with depression; her husband would sometimes follow her to her job at a bakery to make sure she arrived there safewly. Eventually, a job playing country fiddle at a local kitsch palace called the Little Nashville Opry got her making music again. “They made me wear these Hee Haw outfits, polka-dot dresses with little cowboy boots,” she recalls.
Through an Opry colleague, Germano got the call to join Mellencamp’s band, but panic attacks nearly forced her off the road, leading to a year of intensive therapy after she returned to Bloomington. “That’s when I started writing music,” she says, “because I would talk to myself. A lot of that conversation became songs.” Tentatively on her first record, 1990’s long-out-of-print On the Way Down From the Moon Palace, as if she wasn’t sure anyone out there would listen, and then full-blast on 1993’s Happiness, she remade herself, finding redemption as a spokewoman for other snuffed-out spirits.
As we exchange goodbyes on a street corner, Germano sighs that it’s just as well that we never unearthed a psychic. She found herself pregnant last year, she explains, and sought some insight. “First the psychic told me it was a boy. Then she told me it was a girl.” Less than a month later, Germano had a miscarriage. “I should have known something was up.” She memorialized her would-be child with a tattoo of an angel on her ankle. Just like in a Lisa Germano song.
Featured Image: Walking the moon: Lisa Germano (Photo: Pauline St. Denis)
