Back on the road promoting her fifth album, Carving Canyons, American singer-songwriter Lissie reflects on 12 years in the music biz with Hannah Collins – from going independent to catching David Lynch’s eye. 

Lissie is settling. Not in the sense of resigning to mediocrity, but settling down and settling in: to quiet midwestern life away from the bustling West Coast; to making music because she has something to say rather than something to do; to putting her personal wellbeing on equal footing with her creative identity.

Right now, Lissie desperately needs coffee. It’s a crisp 1° midday in Minnesota for her (actually quite warm for the region, apparently). For me, it’s torrential rain on a south Wales evening. But Lissie has a positive spin on my glum surroundings: “I like seasons and I like gloomy weather. I feel like it’s a good counterbalance to the summer; it gives you seasons, you know, of your life.”

Though much of the 40-year-old musician’s work – pop-Americana, broadly speaking – revolves around heartache, there’s an ever-present Californian sunniness to it as well: something that shines through the thick fog of January during our conversation in spite of her confessing to not being long out of bed. Waking up at the crack of the afternoon is, of course, totally permissible for musicians of her standing (expected, even). Having spent over a decade in the industry, and largely independently, Lissie has earned a bit of rock star behaviour.

She’s also on a short break from a world tour that brings her to the UK this month, a “marathon” this recuperation period prepares her for. “I have tons of New Year’s resolutions. I drink too much wine, so I’m trying not to drink this month, maybe even the next three months, so I wake up with more energy. I’m also trying to read before I go to bed instead of watching TV, meditating… all the clichés.”

A combination of TV soundtrack spots and Internet virality in the MySpace and iTunes era helped land Elisabeth Maurus’ musical persona Lissie a record deal with Columbia/Sony in the late 00s. Her debut album, Catching A Tiger, which received a delayed 10-year anniversary reissue in 2021 (Buzz interviewed Lissie about it on its release), was internationally successful. But when her followup was less so, the label dropped her. It was around this time Lissie swapped California for a tiny town in Iowa, where she potters, gardens, cooks, organises, dog walks, and relishes relative anonymity. 

“[The label] was trying to give me opinions about what I should be doing, so I was ready for that relationship to end. Although I’m really grateful for that time – it was nice to have so much help – I was trying to work on music in early 2015 and I was just stressed out: I felt so much responsibility for my band and my crew. I was in a position where I’d need to financially hold everything together and it just made it so that when I was in the studio, I was freaking out. So I very impulsively was like, ‘I’m not doing this right now’, because – and I say this a lot! – there’s more to life than my personas. 

“The pandemic, I think, showed there are so many constructs given to us of what we’re supposed to want. You’re doing all these things that are making you miserable and you’re thinking, this isn’t what I want – I’d rather, I dunno, go be a cleaning lady right now!’ I don’t want to end up resenting music, and I was starting to feel that way in my 30s.

“So I took a step back and found this farm. I have 45 acres of land and I started to shift my energy towards the next chapter of my life, which was being closer to family and finding ways that I could tour enough to still love it but also be home enough so I didn’t hate it. I think it helped me rediscover my love of creating: it took a lot of pressure off, and I did it at my own pace. That’s how I ended up making [second Lissie album] My Wild West, which was released independently and still did pretty well. That gave me my confidence back – knowing I could still do this my way.”

We don’t talk about the pandemic too much (who really wants to anymore?), but it’s hard to not at least touch upon it considering Lissie’s latest album, Carving Canyons, was made right in its midst. Like many of us, lockdown was a rollercoaster of emotions for Lissie: going from living on a Virginian farm with her boyfriend to them splitting up on bad terms, leaving her with only her dog for company. “It was really brutal,” she recalls, “but in a weird way, I almost look back fondly – it forced me to take care of myself.”

Would a more normal 2020 have produced vastly different music? On Carving Canyons, personal pain becomes collective pain under these circumstances, and as Lissie considers the question, she muses on the old adage that tragedy is an unfortunately useful muse. “Before the pandemic, my relationship was pretty solid and I was touring a lot but I wasn’t feeling very inspired to write – I didn’t have a song to sing, or story to tell. There wasn’t anything I was dying to share. Without those, I probably wouldn’t have made this kind of album, but thank goodness for music.”

Aside from her original material, Lissie has also really made a name for herself as a popular covers artist. That success she attributes partly to the variety in what she chooses to cover: from Metallica to One Direction, Lady Gaga to Fleetwood Mac. Her favourite, however, is Kid Cudi’s Pursuit Of Happiness, which is still heavily requested at her shows. Many of these have earned her continued internet fame long after her breakthrough, and as an artist who was in the right place at the right time for the advent of social media, she’s not envious of newcomers in the industry today who are under continual pressure to be multi-platform content creators, 24/7. 

We then touch on other contentious issues in the music business, such as the pittance musicians make from streaming services (Lissie disdainfully reminds me a billionaire owns Spotify) and skyrocketing ticket prices for gigs. “So much of what’s been the norm isn’t sustainable. These clever companies have figured out how to make millions and millions of dollars without really having to do a whole lot.” She wearily admits that while she feels for those worst affected, she’s not paying much attention to it all, concluding: “We’re gonna see a lot of these structural things break down. It’s going to be uncomfortable and chaotic and scary, but that’s what’s about to happen.”

On the less doom and gloom side of things, it must be pretty cool calling someone like David Lynch – who invited her to perform for the Twin Peaks revival – a fan, right? “It is! I don’t really think of myself as being particularly cool. And he’s like, so legendarily cool. Out of the blue, he became a big supporter of me and my band and came to see us.

“He’s the nicest, warmest, most encouraging person: he just cheers for people. And he’s so authentically himself. Sometimes – because I live in a place where no one else is in my industry – I forget that I have this other life where I’m kind of a rock star, I guess.” 

Lissie, Tramshed, Cardiff, Wed 15 Feb. Tickets: £25/£92.50 VIP. Info: here

Carving Canyons is out now via Lionboy Records.

words HANNAH COLLINS