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Lisa Germano | Interview
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the red alert |Adam McKibbin Featured InterviewAugust 2006Lisa Germano is the rare songwriter - though she doesn't think of herself as a songwriter (more on that later) - who occupies her own unique sphere. Her newest album, In the Maybe World, keeps building on the framework established by her albums on Capitol and 4AD in the '90s. Her stories are told through a carnivalesque filter, wrapping up lyrical wounds in a dreamlike gauze. Past records have chronicled isolation, addiction, fear of rejection, and even her own experience with a stalker. In the Maybe World, to put it in the most general of terms, is the death album; as Germano puts it, the result of "trying to write my way out of feeling bad about death." While it wasn't a given - hers is not a discography of happy endings - the album winds up being as much about deliverance and release.When you're out on the road as part of another artist's touring band, does that feel like time off, in a way, or is it more stressful to be on someone else's dime?It does feel like time off, actually. It's really good because it helps me to rejuvenate. My stuff can......
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Lisa Germano | Review
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hybridmagazine.com | Tracy M. Rogers elements of electronica and chamber pop July 06In The Maybe WorldA cursory listen to Lisa Germano's latest In the Maybe World reveals a slightly disconcerting record filled with subtle experimentation and brutal, unflinching lyrical honesty. In truth, Germano has produced an atmospheric collection of minimalist ballads that incorporates elements of electronica and chamber pop alongside lyrics of loss. Each song on In the Maybe World is at once intimate and distant, cerebral and emotionally centered. Germano tackles loneliness on the sparse "Too Much Space," which features her sweetest vocals on the album. "Into Oblivion," by contrast, features more inscrutable lyrics that could either be about death or the end of a relationships set to slowly crescendoing, strummed guitars. "In the Land of Fairies" is perhaps the most haunting, ethereal song on the CD, with its lyrics of a fairy tale gone wrong, sinister falsetto chorus, and minor key piano arrangement. "Wire," meanwhile, features Germano's most brokenhearted vocals, replete with sighs and cracks that are reminiscent of Lucinda Williams without the twang. The slow-burning simmer of "Red Thread" finds its emotional center in anger and desolation, while Germano's tribute to Jeff Buckley, "Except For the Ghosts,"......
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Lisa Gemano | Review
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Under The Radar Magazine | Gareth Maher She has the type of voice that can seduce, excite and entertain the listener.Summer '06In the Maybe WorldWith this album, Lisa has opened up much more of herself than she ever has on previous records. The twelve songs reveal a purity and honesty to not only her songwriting, but her singing as well. On "Too Much Space" there is an elegant dream-like ambience that her vocals perfectly express with a measured dosage of timing and pitch. She has the type of voice that can seduce, excite and entertain the listener. It also helps that she can rely on the strength of deeply affecting songs like "Into Oblivion," "Wire," and "Except for the Ghosts." Whether you listen to this album from start to finish or using shuffle, there is enchanting imagery to these songs that is impossible to escape. You will want to play this album allover again as soon as it finished. ...
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Lisa Gemano | Review
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Spin Magazine | Mikael Wood Germano's wooziest and most ethereal yetAugust '06In the Maybe WorldA rock violinist-for-hire whose Rolodex probably rivals Itzhak Perlman's (she's played with John Mellencamp and David Bowie, among others), Lisa Germano treats her circus-noir solo albums like opportunities to play the freaky shit that her bandleader bosses would never go for. In the Maybe World, her seventh album, is Germano's wooziest and most ethereal yet, a haunted swirl of shimmering strings, breathy vocals and warped-mirror piano....
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Lisa Germano | Review
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popmatters.com | Mike Schiller her all-but-trademarked breathy vocal style and extreme musical serenity, never less than gorgeousJuly 18/06In the Maybe World(Young God) Lisa Germano doesn't owe us anything. Already, she's graced us with some of the loveliest music to fall into the 'underground' label, her all-but-trademarked breathy vocal style and extreme musical serenity never less than gorgeous. Her last album, Lullaby for Liquid Pig, is one of the most beautiful odes to addiction (and the complications that go with that addiction) that has ever been written, flitting in and out of disparate musical styles while never quite losing the sense of utter stillness that she has, of late, become known for. Her willingness to try different styles of percussion, instrumentation, and methods of melodic development kept an album that easily could have been construed as dull from ever even approaching such a label.No such luck with In the Maybe World.I will grant her this ‹I don't know that Ms. Germano will ever again write a poor lyric. Whether literal or metaphorical, terrestrial or celestial, her words don't smack you upside the head so much as they drip into your consciousness, a slowly leaking faucet that you never want to fix. Her......