This article was on the days headlines at RollingStone....pretty interesting reading and provides some insight into her seemingly troubled mind...


Titled: Germano Puts "Pig" To Rest
'First set in five years chronicles battle with addiction'





There's a story Lisa Germano likes to tell about a nightclub performance a while back. After her set, she was sitting in a toilet stall when a bunch of women came into the bathroom and started talking about her songs -- how they made one of them want to slit her wrists.
"It was funny," Germano laughs. "I had a good night . . . Some people just aren't going to like it."

Indifference to people who don't get her music is almost required of an artist like Germano. Since her most visible role in music dried up -- fiddle player in John Mellencamp's Eighties-era band -- Germano has quietly released four albums of fractured rock & roll. The eerie, layered songs she writes are the musical equivalent of Crispin Glover's public persona, a sort of ironic state where you're never quite sure whether Germano is telling the joke or self-immolating.

Her fifth effort, coming a full five years after the last, Slide, is Lullaby For the Liquid Pig, a strangely hopeful record about addiction and its accompanying emotional range. The songs, which Germano wrote during a particularly tumultuous time in her life, maintain a dreamlike quality while quietly screaming out for attention.

"It's a lullaby of insomnia," Germano says from her Los Angeles home. "When you feel that you want to hear it and you're ready to listen to it, you might like it. But, it's not the music you put on at a party . . . It's not nice."

Amid the songs' dischordant notes and trembling effects are some truly beautiful melodies. "The songs on this record started as ideas around the idea of isolation," Germano says. "You think you might be OK in the world if you just close yourself off. But that really doesn't work. Being that lonely makes you sick."

And when you're that lonely, your creativity can be stunted. Germano was working in a bookstore along the Sunset Strip for a few years, as she recovered from a series of events including being dropped by her former label, losing her manager and dealing with an unrequited mania for another person. That addiction to this man, she says, became the album's title track and a pulpit from which to explore all of the different tentacles of obsession: "I need a fix/A little one," she sings. "Well if I do stop/Or if I don't stop/It doesn't matter/I probably won't stop."

"I needed to find something else to do," she says. "I would come home and write songs, but I didn't ever think I'd put another record out again."

Tony Berg, record producer, fledgling label head and fan of Germano's, began frequenting the bookstore to hear the new songs. One thing led to another, and Lullaby became the debut release from Ineffable, the label Berg started with iMusic.

As the songs that became Lullaby began to take shape, Germano started sharing her work, digitally, with friends like Johnny Marr, Neil Finn and Joey Waronker. With the help of ProTools, Germano collaborated with her friends from near and far, though their contributions are almost transparent to the beauty of her unique songwriting and recording style.

Now she hopes to share her songs with other kindred spirits. "There are so many people out there who need a connection to the world," Germano says. "I feel like if they could know about my records it might help them to not feel so alone."

ANDREW STRICKMAN
(May 22, 2003)