"At first, I thought this record was a bunch of songs about death, but it's really songs about life," says multi-instrumentalist songwriter Lisa Germano. "For instance, in the song, 'In the Maybe World,' my cats were bringing me these dead birds from the roof, and it was upsetting me a lot, so I wrote a song about how I didn't want that to happen anymore. But then I realized that these cats were really trying to give me a message here. They were so proud of themselves, so happy with these birds that they'd killed for me, and so happy to be able to show them to me. It was really a revelation. I mean, how many times do I have to be reminded to appreciate my life?"
It's fitting that "In the Maybe World" is the title song for Germano's latest record. Not only do the rest of the songs on the album follow suite with this deceptively simple philosophy of trying to appreciate the little things in life, they also suggest what the possible alternative of not appreciating them can bring. It's possibly her most intensely human work yet, which is really saying something when you consider that Germano's past records have delved into the subjects of attempted suicide, abortion, psychotic depression, and what leads to all those things. In "In the Land of Fairies," she groggily asks a "narcissistic little fairy" why she feels dead, and orders it "out of her head." In "Wire," she simultaneously alludes to masturbation and death in just about every verse. In "Red Thread" -- my 10-year-old's favorite song on the record -- Germano ends the song by singing, over and over again, "Go to Hell/Fuck you/I love you."
"I just write all the time," says Germano. "I don't really think anymore in terms of making records; I just write. I work full-time at a book store, so the last couple of years, I would just work, and then come and write and color it, and record it, and at a certain point, I went, Hmm, I think I have a record here, maybe. And it seems like there's a theme about a lot of different situations that I was writing about, but trying to look at that stuff a different way. Like, to comfort myself in certain situations. So they're not really depressing songs, I don't think. They're songs about processes, kind of how to think your way out of something. It's not, like, 'Oh, everybody's dead! Poor me!' It's more like, 'Oh, I wonder how I can look at that?' So anyway, at some point, I just thought I had a record. I sent it to Michael Gira at Young God Records, and he told me to finish it because he wanted to put it out on his label."
In ironic coincidence, the first time I played Germano's new record was also the first time I came across a 1970s reissue of the medieval series "The Dance of Death," a group of woodcuts depicting the onslaught of the Black Plague on 14th century Europe. The album worked perfectly as a soundtrack to the "slide show" of burnt wood frames depicting friendly skeletons dancing with starving but ecstatically happy peasants dressed in rags, almost as though the two had been written around one another. Like Germano, "The Dance of Death" comes from the Italian Catholic tradition of facing death head-on in order to appreciate life. Listening to the music she's been releasing on her own since 1991, it's hard to imagine that Germano was such a good fit with John Mellencamp when she played violin with him back in the 1980s.
"The songs I write, they're little puzzles," finishes Germano. Some songs just come out right away, as a full song. Other ones, I'll write a song, and maybe two years later, I'll completely change the lyrics until it's not even the same song at all. And I might even think the song's done for the time being, but I'm always open to interpretation of changing things. I guess it's easier to say, I know when a song's not done. I mean, I wouldn't put it on the record if I don't think it's done. Sometimes my songs mean something different to me than two years after I write it, and I go, That's what that song was about. It's a funny thing."
