AEM065 Lisa Germano

When you cast a look over her resume, it’s aston­ish­ing that Indiana-born song­writer Lisa Ger­mano isn’t more well known: Ses­sion work with Bob Dylan and The Indigo Girls (?!); albums released on Capi­tol and 4AD to acco­lades in Rolling Stone and Spin; col­lab­o­ra­tions involv­ing Johnny Marr, Phil Sel­way, Giant Sand, Calex­ico, among oth­ers; oceans of praise from Swan/Angel of Light Michael Gira, who has released her last few albums on his Young God imprint; stints accom­pa­ny­ing pop leg­ends like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Sheryl Crow. She’s worked with more rock super­stars than most peo­ple have had jobs, yet she still remains appeal­ingly enig­matic and (this is a dan­ger­ous word to throw around in talk­ing about artists, but still) child­like. There’s some­thing about her music that man­ages to be com­pletely open and sim­ple and yet at the same time elu­sive and mys­te­ri­ous, much in the way of the wis­dom of lit­tle chil­dren. Her music is not, thank­fully, cloy­ingly cute like most of the other artists who hap­pen to strike, inten­tion­ally or not, the child­like aesthetic.

Take, for exam­ple, her Ampeater B-side “The Prince of Plati,” drawn from her lat­est Young God release Magic Neigh­bor. The chord pro­gres­sions are fairly sim­ple, the vocals strong and at the fore in a style that calls to mind PJ Har­vey and other un-wispy female singers, the lyrics direct and unam­bigu­ous in their plea to a lover for a lit­tle com­fort and escape and play. The song is appeal­ing in part because it doesn’t shy away from direct­ness in search of some kind of untouch­ably cool ambi­gu­ity, some­thing that is irri­tat­ingly com­mon in younger song­writ­ers. In fact, it’s so direct and inti­mate, it almost feels voyeuris­tic to lis­ten to it, some­thing that’s enhanced by lyrics like “oh, nobody lookin/oh nobody see.” The whole song stands, lyri­cally, as an attack on the narrator’s own jad­ed­ness and an embrace of tran­sient joys. She wants to “do the things we did before we thought we knew,” to return to a time before her assump­tions about what life is or isn’t robbed her of the free­dom to step out­side her tired rou­tines. The men­tions of sto­ry­telling and play, sim­plis­tic and well-worn metaphors (sad­ness = blue), really draw out the child­like core of the song, mak­ing it easy to under­stand why Gira has said that her music reminds him of “early Dis­ney songs.”

The unadorned and sub­tle arrange­ment enhances the sim­plic­ity and inno­cence of the song per­fectly. The chim­ing, upper reg­is­ter piano def­i­nitely brings the Dis­ney thing back to mind, espe­cially in the slightly off-kilter lydian melody that closes out the song. As any mod­ern jazz musi­cian knows, the sharp 11 is the magic note that makes every­thing sound floaty and ethe­real. Like all the other arrange­ments on Magic Neigh­bor, it was mostly worked out on the spot, and you can hear this in lis­ten­ing. The bass and pedal steel parts are sim­ple and they never step on the vocals, which remain right up front, inches from your ears, instead choos­ing to fill out the back­drop of the song with airy clouds of sound. Germano’s voice walks a fine line between the breathy vul­ner­a­bil­ity inher­ent to the lyrics and nec­es­sary to a song so inti­mate, and the strength that is obvi­ously there to be tapped. Rather than giv­ing us every­thing she has, she draws us in by hold­ing back.

A-side “Rep­tile” works a sim­i­lar magic, work­ing a very famil­iar I IV V chord pro­gres­sion and bare bones rock beat into some­thing that some­how sounds strange. This sim­plic­ity is con­trasted by the totally bizarre lyrics about light freak­ing out dying, God being a soul mas­tur­ba­tor, and extrater­res­tri­als hand­ing out pam­phlets of light to singers. I have no idea, but it cer­tainly puts some images in your head. “Rep­tile” was orig­i­nally recorded for 7 Worlds Col­lide, an Oxfam-benefiting char­ity CD curated by Liam Finn (of Split Enz and Crowded House fame), and it fea­tures Finn and Wilco drummer/improvising musi­cian Glenn Kotche col­lab­o­rat­ing (I think) on one the most awe­somely asym­met­ri­cal drum parts I’ve ever heard in my life. It kind of sounds like they brought them into the stu­dio, and had them play along with the song the first time they’d ever heard it. It’s a kind of spon­tane­ity that is so sel­dom heard in recorded music in a day and age when peo­ple tend to favor rigidly orches­trated parts over the con­ver­sa­tional style of sev­eral musi­cians play­ing together, play­ing off one another (one could eas­ily make the argu­ment that this is a self-perpetuating cycle caused by a simul­ta­ne­ous rise of over­dub­bing and decline in tech­ni­cal skill among rock musi­cians, but that argu­ment is prob­a­bly best reserved for another forum). The song itself is so easy to fol­low, and the main bass and snare pat­tern so con­stant, that the per­cus­sion track is able to slip into part after part on instru­ment after instru­ment (con­gas, wood­block, rhumba-infused rim clicks, big cym­bal splashes, laconic hi-hat, atonal marimba, thun­der­ing toms, metal­lic shak­ers) and never risk los­ing the lis­tener. The fact that cho­rus of women’s voices that kicks in on the cho­rus sounds like a group of untrained singers in a room (you can hear them laugh­ing spo­rad­i­cally clap­ping dur­ing the song) only adds to the feel­ing of loose­ness and light­ness that makes “Rep­tile” so lovely and lively.

Germano’s music these days is “about try­ing to be happy with all the sad shit in the world, deal­ing with your own fights and being the mighty one who rises above it,” and that is as straight-forward and noble a mis­sion state­ment as I’ve heard from a musi­cian in a long while. It’s plain as day when you lis­ten to her songs that this is the truth, and, for those of us who’d rather explore than be inscrutably hip, it’s as refresh­ing as a spray mis­ter full of cold water on a sum­mer after­noon in the park.

Gabe Birn­baum

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