Many people’s first encounter with Lissie was through a 2010 YouTube live performance video, tweeted by Kid Cudi. The clip captures the Illinois-born singer/songwriter taking a swill of tequila before attacking Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness” with her three-piece band, changing its self-determined narrative from inner monologue to plugged-in town square sermon. She shouts, strums, warbles and at one point drops her guitar and straight testifies, singing with her hands as much as her voice.
Buoyed by the Cudi cover and others, including Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” Lissie released her wholly original debut album, “Catching a Tiger,” in June 2010. While it’s sold only 47,000 copies in the United States, according to Nielsen SoundScan, it positioned her as an artist to watch and got Lissie significant traction in Europe, especially England and Norway. Now, with sophomore effort “Back to Forever” (Columbia) due Oct. 8, she’s attempting to both widen her audience and create a studio identity that matches her urgent stage presence.
“I’m proud of and excited about the music I make in the studio. It’s a good vehicle for giving songs an official life,” says the refreshingly unfiltered artist who was born Elisabeth Maurus. “But it’s a challenge. I always have a million people chiming in and messing with my head, with opinions I have to take into account. It becomes more complicated than fun, to be honest.”
The tension between Lissie’s core folk-rock tendencies and the potential of a pop moment that existed on “Catching a Tiger” is still present on “Back to Forever.” Artists like Ellie Goulding and Tegan & Sara have tread similarly hopeful yet uneven ground on recent efforts. But the new album’s boldest crossover attempts cast Lissie not as a pretty singing head but as a more muscular rock goddess, a la Steve Nicks in the ’80s. Take first single “Shameless,” about her struggle with the aesthetic expectations of musicians, which she snarls with indie conviction. Or second single “Further Away (Romance Police),” which erupts into a wailing guitar solo before Lissie belts the final refrain like there’s a white-winged dove in the room. Matched with a tour de force like the Neil Young-ian “Mountaintop Removal,” about a destructive form of mining, and more plaintive tracks like “Love in the City,” and the album’s closing track and namesake, it’s a bravura performance.
“The thing that ties it all together is Lissie’s amazing voice,” says Peter Leak, her longtime manager at Red Light. “She enjoys the fact that she can try different things on different songs, and it’s important as an artist to continue to do that. She managed to create a real body of work with this album.”
For Sharon Lord — head of marketing for Red Light, which is working with Columbia to set up “Back to Forever” — the key is “getting people to see her live.” A series of promotional dates across the United States has garnered good responses for the new material, she says, and a big national TV look is “about to confirm.” The video for “Further Away” premiered July 22 internationally. “Her fans are really avid, and we wanted to make sure everybody got it at the same time on a global basis,” Lord says.
Lissie is partnering with her friend Todd Hallberg to create her own edition of his Métl brand of mezcal and tequila (“You just can’t get good tequila in Europe,” she says), which could result in some launch events, Lord says. She’s also doing an album pre-order with Pledge Music, a crowd-funding company that allows artists to bundle new releases with merchandise and other limited items and solicit donations for their favorite charities. (Lissie’s are the Changing Tides orphanage in Jacmel, Haiti, and Laura’s Legacy, a fund named after her aunt who died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.) She’s on tour in Europe until the fall, but returns stateside in October for the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
Lissie’s follow-your-bliss approach onstage manifests in her take on her career, too. “The certain routes you take to quote-unquote ‘make it’…Whenever anyone says, ‘This is the thing,’ I’m skeptical, because it’s usually the stuff you did on accident, without thinking, that affects people the most,” she says. “There are no rules anymore. You could make some silly video and it would get a million hits. The key is to stay open-minded and be up for new things.”