Lisa has lived and created her music in many different places around the world, including Japan, Australia, the UK, and now the US, having followed the road wherever her instincts have led. “I’ve listened to my intuition. I started by really wanting to study music and theatre overseas, but it was just so expensive. I studied jazz at Auckland University, after a year of working in a music store and teaching music. I was playing somewhere in Auckland, and someone in the room asked if I wanted to go to Japan. I love the idea of travelling and experiences, so I said yes, and then two weeks later, I was there.”
After an amazing experience in Japan, Lisa says it felt right to move on, having realising she really wanted to create move of her own music. London was the next adventure, where she spent six months before returning to New Zealand. Within a couple of years however, Australia was calling, and Lisa felt inclined to make the move to Melbourne, where she spent the next few years before eventually heading to LA.
“I’ve always wanted to go there, I’ve done trips and conferences, and it’s really felt like, aside from being extremely challenging at the start, the place I want to be, for the next while. New Zealand’s always going to be home, and I’m very, very grateful to have such a wonderful place to come back to. I don’t plan on going anywhere else for a while.” As luck would have it, Lisa had arrived in LA a matter of weeks before the world was thrust into uncertainty with the arrival of the Covid-19 epidemic.
Despite the timing however, LA has been great for Lisa. “It’s one of the hardest, but also the most amazing places that I’ve lived, and it’s opened up a lot of different doors and been a chance to use the different skills that I’ve had iin terms of writing – writing music for other people, playing in bands, and also doing events. Playing gigs that are 4 hours of all requests, and being able to live off that to support my own music. It’s got these different avenues, and it’s such a unique place, and you never really do know what’s going to happen there.”
Although a major portion of her career has been spent overseas, there is one thing in particular which still shines through as being uniquely kiwi – her humour. “My awkward sense of humour still comes through. Sometimes when I talk in between songs, people don’t quite know what I’m saying, but the right people do. The humour is quite different there, it’s more obvious and less dry. I think in my songwriting, I still sort of do the funny, sad thing consistently, and the way I look at the world and sort of have in-jokes to myself, but I know a lot of kiwis would resound with some of these things as well … my outlook on things, the melodr is often more upbeat, with the lyrics maybe a bit more meloncholy or thought provoking.”
Perhaps even more important is the sense of community and support which the New Zealand music community brings to one another. “I feel after a number of years, I’ve met some really genuine people that want to come out and support each other, and make something really great. The kiwi in me wants to create an experience and have musicians support each other, rather than just show up and do their thing and be looking for what they can get out of a situation. I tried to take that with me, and be pretty genuine and pretty honest.”
Lisa’s career has been nothing if not diverse. From songwriting and musical theatre to session work and television appearances on shows like Go Girls and Shortland Street, how have these different worlds shaped the way she writes and performs now?
“Growing up in West Auckland, I did singing, acting, dancing, and I wanted to pursue that. I thought musical theatre was going to be my life. I’ve always loved different kinds of music. I didn’t necessarily grow up with the ‘Dunedin sound’ or anything like that, I was later to explore those things. A lot of what I listened to was christian rock and Andrew Lloyd Webber. Everything kind of connects to something like the theatre stuff.”
Lisa’s love of acting is also something which has made an impact on her musical career, shining through within her music videos. “My music videos are a nice outlet for that kind of thing, creating a story, and I’ll usually work pretty closely with the director, creating a narrative to portray the song in a way that might not be what people think of. I get to be silly, and do different concepts, and I love that stuff as well. I think there’s 29 music videos now. I could make a short film. That’s actually probably a really long film.”
Life as a musician in Los Angeles can be incredibly diverse, from playing requests in bars to performing at parties with some of Hollywood’s biggest names. “There’s a bar I play at in Hollywood called Tramp Stamp Grannies. You don’t have to have a tramp stamp, but maybe there’ll be free drinks if you did, I’m not too sure. But it’s owned by one of the guys from Glee, who’s very involved in musical theatre, so they attract that sort of audience. I’ll literally be on my phone and have an iPad, I’ve maybe never heard the song before and someone will send me $5 on Venmo. I’ve got to quickly look up the song, while I’m playing this song, and just the experience of learning music, I’m sight reading the melody and both lines on the piano, trying not to stare at my iPad the whole time while trying to perform. All for $5. The things they do for $5.
I feel like I have a bit of a Flight of the Conchords-esque lifestyle sometimes, the next night I’m getting sent to someone’s house, and I don’t know where it is, and it’s Sharon Stone’s house. Just the variety of weird gigs. I played for a burrito, and the next night I played for someone that owns one of the biggest companies in the world, and it’s weird. The Kardashians are in the room, and they’re not very nice to me, and it’s just this weird contrast. I feel like that all comes out in my songwriting, the observational stuff.”
Fans of Lisa’s music will be all too familiar with the emotional honesty of her music, with the pop sensibility she’s known for. How does she balance saying something that’s very personal, without letting the song become too introspective?
“Sometimes I don’t know whether to just go all in and be extremely, extremely honest. It’s just a way of me processing my thoughts and maybe how others could connect to it as well. Most of it is me trying to understand how I’m feeling about something, and maybe I’ll be really specific when I’m writing lyrics, but then I’ll think ‘maybe let’s turn this into a chorus that people could sing along to a bit better’, or maybe this could be about this as well as this.
I wouldn’t say I’m like pop-pop, I’m not really sort of aiming for the Top 40 Pop market, but I love the challenge of writing differently in those styles too. For me, it’s just a way of expressing how I feel and hopefully others can connect to it as well. Sometimes I’ll be very honest and just say exactly what it was, other times it’ll be a bit more vague. Some of these things are started as autobiographical, and kind of take a bit of a journey into something more. I just love singing along to stuff as well, I think sometimes with lyrics, as listeners, we’ve had a log of information, and in verses we’re getting these descriptions and processing a lot, and sometimes it’s nice to think ‘let’s let the audience breathe for a bit, and just have something simple on the chorus, because it’s a lot to take in.”
Lisa’s latest EP, New Girl Syndrome, is a record about reinvention, identify and navigating change. But where did the idea of the ‘new girl’ come from, and who is she?
“I remember moving to these different places, and feeling like the new person, even though it’s sort of like ‘forever an emerging artist’ kind of thing. For me, I’m like in Hollywood, and I had to go to open mics just to play and meet people, just starting over from scratch, even though I’m not new to music as well. I suppose that journey in Melbourne and England, and in LA as well, and even New Zealand, you are always trying as an indie artist to write music that people connect with, but sometimes it’s about going out networking and as an introvert, that can be really exhausting. When I try online dating and in Los Angeles, it’s all about the shiniest new thing, and it’s like fast food, you kind of feel like you’re celebrated for a while, or interesting for a while, and as a performer I felt like maybe people think an idea about you that’s not true. After a while, maybe you’re not shiny and new, and there’s someone better to talk to, and ti’s just so easy to go on to the next thing or next person. It’s a different world there, in that sense too. I don’t do the internet dating thing any more, thank goodness!
I guess the New Girl Syndrome is not really being new, but feeling new, and feeling old at the same time. It’s a line in my song Call it a Night – ‘new girl syndrome won’t take you long, you love to make your playlists but you only listen for so long’, sort of like oh, this is exciting, and then moving on. That’s the world, social media. There’s a story behind that.”
New Girl Syndrome is available now across various streaming platforms.
