Lissie Proves You Can Go Home Again
When folk-rock singer-songwriter Lissie moved back to the Midwest and bought a 10-acre farm in northeast Iowa – just across the river from her hometown of Rock Island, Illinois – it was bittersweet. She was leaving California after five years in Hollywood and seven in pastoral Ojai, and she wasn’t sure what her next creative step would be. But the move inspired her to release a concept album of sorts, My Wild West (its poignant final track is titled “Ojai”), and it has become her most well-received release, by critics and fans alike.
“I think I understood the game as like, ‘OK, you gotta get back in the studio and get another deal and be A&R’d, and write songs with a bunch of other people and have people scrutinize them and tell you which ones are good,’” says Lissie, who was signed to Sony for years but is now proudly independent. “I was sort of preparing to do that, and then the beginning of 2015 I was like, ‘I’m not enjoying this anymore. I’m not having fun. I’m done’… So I decided not to make an album.”
Eventually, however, Lissie began making music just for herself, with no intention of releasing it, and her creative juices flowed once more. “I sort of reverse-psychology’d myself and took all the expectations off and all the pressure off, and suddenly I had this album that was my way of processing that I was leaving California after 12 years. So it became apparent about halfway through that this is my wild west,” she says. The album title is also a nod to the new frontier of the indie-driven music business, where the old rules of her Sony days no longer apply.
There was a time when Lissie, born Elisabeth Corrin Maurus, would have never believed she would return to her Midwestern stomping grounds. “When I left the Midwest at 18, I got kicked out of high school. I always felt like no one understood me. I was like, ‘This place sucks and I hate it!’” she laughs. “But then as I got older… as I started to travel the world more, I realized, ‘Oh, I’m very Midwestern’… There were all these things that I found myself longing for. If you’d told me when I was 18 that I would ever live back in the Midwest, I would have said, ‘No way!’ Now that I’m older, I appreciate my roots, but when I was younger I would have said, ‘That place is boring, it’s not cultured.’ But I was so wrong.”
While Lissie says her Illinois childhood wasn’t difficult – she had a loving and stable family life – she does say, “High school was hard for me. I could never just accept this is how it is. You go to school and you have your textbooks and they say, ‘This is how it is,’ and I was like, ‘Well, what if it’s not like that?’ And then you get in trouble for talking back. In school I got in a lot of trouble, but my parents always stuck up for me because they didn’t think I was being properly challenged.
“I just had a lot of weird adults and authority figures in my school, where they saw I had a certain light in me and it was their personal mission to extinguish it. It was creepy! But that’s their own wounds and their own baggage. I just feel bad for them that they are jerks! So it wasn’t hard, but I had some bad things happen in high school. I struggled for sure. I got depressed and cut off all my hair and pierced my nose and got a tattoo. I rebelled.” (She also got kicked out of school and thrown in jail for assaulting a public official – a story she’d rather not get into – but fortunately, she was not charged.)
“I’ve mellowed out with age,” Lissie chuckles. “If I had had a great high school experience, I don’t think I would have been motivated to do what I’ve done. I think adversity is very helpful, especially when you’re young and going for what you want out of life.”
Lissie’s struggles continued in Los Angeles during her major-label years, but she also says that shaped her as an artist. “I definitely think that going to Los Angeles and having all the surreal experiences that I had… I don’t think I would be making the kind of music I am or having this career if I hadn’t moved away for a while… I’m really great for the time I had in Hollywood. And those were hard years! I had some dark days when I live in Hollywood. The music business is brutal. It can destroy your soul! But I got out of it OK… I wouldn’t change a thing. It was important that I left and saw some of the world. But now I’m 33 and I’m ready to find a balance between having a home life and career.”
Lissie’s life may not be what we expected when she first set out on her journey at age 18, but she’s fine with that. “The idea when I was young was that you get a record deal, then you sell albums and you become a huge star. That’s not the world that I now live in, but I’m sort of glad for it, because now, being an independent artist, I can have so much more control and ownership… That sort of dream of being a rock star is few and far between now. But for me I think that’s great, because my goal is not that. My goal is like, how do I sustain a long, lasting career that I enjoy? What does that look like?”
Lissie is pleased by My Wild West’spositive reception, but says at this independent point in her life, she’s mainly making music for herself. “Sometimes press can be very snarky and people can be very cynical. I’m not trying to be cool or make some statement with my fashion or my sound. I’m just trying to express myself… I don’t understand why people take the time to say, ‘You expressing your feelings isn’t very good!’”
In the end, the only opinion that really matters to her besides her own is her fans’. “I met a guy who had lost his father and he had listened to my music and found my voice really healing,” she recalls fondly. “And I was like, ‘Well, that is such a huge compliment. I’m so glad that I can be a part of your life.’ That’s really what it’s about for me. These songs are mine, but they also belong to the listener.”
Have a listen to Lissie’s two acoustic South by Southwest performances here.
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