wytchcroft | Why i like Lisa Germano

Drifting Orbits – why I like Lisa Germano: Part One.

It feels strange to try and pin down an appreciation for someone whose music is so lightly winged, a moth under the moonlight, a silk scarf around the lamp – but here goes.

As a child pretty much convinced I was a Martian and that it was very unlikely that I would hear any message from my home-world, I was pretty much resigned to being alone.

I remember bawling through the Martian chronicles – I recognised the architecture, costumes, gestures and masks of the supposed aliens. The Man Who Fell To Earth had the same effect. Strangely, so did Emily from Bagpuss – which is where I discovered my love of cats. Also, the Clangers.

Then time moved on, I found that there ARE clusters of aliens here – around and about.

That was a good thing.

But these clusters don’t last long – and the supposedly hip community I was moving in eventually dissolved into a pile of glitter and recriminations. I took my cats and ran. This was now the 1990s – and two flukes brought Lisa Germano to my attention. One was a tape given to me by a friend (with Mojave III on the other side, lush.). That was gorgeous. And there were cats on it! Cats! :) No album details though and no pictures with the tape.

The second fluke was not being able to get tickets to see Kristin Hersh – at that time one of the only singers who made any sense to me. I went to a different gig instead… and that was Neil Finn... and his special guests were Johnny Marr and Lisa Germano.

She materialised out of nowhere in a silver dress, under a spotlight she appeared to be dodging, and she played the violin and sang. I had a high balcony seat and had to be restrained from flinging myself off it as I was struck by the same shock of recognition I used to get from Emily and the Martians. Here was someone from the mother planet! At last!

Well ok, sure so I was over excited but hey – it turned out to be a great gig that all three artists performed to their best, so that was that.

I got home and started buying up the albums as they came. I have yet to be disappointed. A lot of moods, emotions, bitter-sweet trains of thought - and often sardonically hilarious – all wrapped in the same rich aural fabric that would on occasion burst into flame.

But throughout all the CDs, all the tracks, all the songs, ran a thread, a twine that any cat could chase through reality and beyond - to the maybe world itself. Lisa has said that the last album felt like a completion and I think I understand why – all the previous recordings (even Lullaby) seem to be a journey (back to the moon palace perhaps) but now she seems to have arrived and the songs appear to be both a testament to, and exploration of, that fact.

Once there was a way to get back homeward? Lisa Germano may know the truth of that – and her music is the closest I’ve come yet to discovering that truth myself.

In the Dollhouse – Lisa Germano pt2.

I am a fan of the TV show Firefly and its spin-off movie Serenity. I have scribbled a fair number of fan fiction pieces as a result. I don’t find it easy. Lisa Germano’s music has helped me directly many times. There is the spacey banjo, mandolin sound, the melancholy piano, the wild free violin and the strange industrial intrusions – in fact some of her early work seems to have very definitely inspired the soundtrack to the series.

But there is more – in the show, one of the main characters, a fugitive young woman called River, has a lot in common with Lisa – the intelligence, the left-field insights and dream logic of her thought and speech. River has been scarred by her treatment at ‘The Academy’ – an experience she survived by holding on the fairytale concept of a prince to the rescue (the kind of ideal skewered in Aimee Mann’s ‘Save Me’). The Academy could easily serve as a metaphor for Germano’s experience within the music industry. Although she is indeed rescued – life after the Academy is just as fraught and complex as River realises the past never really dies and that the ultimate rescuer must be herself. She is also outstandingly funny. Much of her dialogue sounds like a lyric from Lisa; “Also, I can kill you with my brain.” Her disgust of being “Dressed up like a gorram doll” echoes Lisa's songs ‘Destroy the Flower’ and ‘Puppet’. River is also multi-talented – but the talent comes at the price of frequent emotional blackness.

River is a very hard character to write – Lisa Germano’s music has helped me with that on many occasions as well as inspiring moods for a given chapter and even plot ideas.

This is of course just my take, my perspective, my experience of Lisa Germano’s music. I’m sure everyone else discovering this site has had a similarly personal response.

Thank you for reading about mine.