On the Road Again
Live Reviews:

Lisa Germano (Opening for The Eels)
November 4, 1998
Lee's Palace, Toronto, ON

The first time I heard Lisa Germano was about a year ago. Her CD was playing between acts at a club, and the voice/cello/distorted- guitar combination - very Velvet Underground - was so striking that I had to ask the DJ who it was. "Lisa Germano, Happiness," he said. I made a mental note to buy it, and typically forgot about it over the next couple of days. But every time I heard her name, it reminded me.

So when her new album, Slide, arrived at the Chart office, I was all ears. And what a fine piece of work it turned out to be: Haunting, bittersweet, quietly melancholy, sparsely produced and arranged to highlight her unique, whispering sigh of a voice. A lot of people try this sort of thing, but few pull it off as well. I knew I had to catch her live.

Where, indeed, she more than lived up to the record. Playing solo - armed with only a Fender, a piano and a harmonium (I think that's what it was) - she mesmerized a quietly attentive, near-capacity audience at Lee's Palace.

Effortlessly cool in a checked flannel shirt and black jeans, Germano played it straight-up and unpretentious. Her minimal, slightly elusive songs shone from onstage, especially a stellar version of "If I Think Of Love," and the slightly Kurt Weill-ish "Hardwood Floors."

Tori Amos has spawned a legion of fair-to-middling Woman-At-A-Piano artists, but Germano's the genuine article, a natural. The texture of her voice is a hushed breathing that's intimate and personal as the content of her songs. Her playing is exactly as accomplished as it needs to be to get the point across. Very few musicians know enough about what they're doing to understate a performance so captivatingly. She's subtle and affecting, without so much as a speck of bullshit: Artful without being arty, a rare feat.

Between songs, one audience member called for her to play the fiddle (which she used to do for John Mellencamp around the "Paper In Fire" days). She shot back, "My fiddle's in my purse. I left it on the bus." When Germano discovered a bum key on the piano, she said, "That might make this song sound weird. But weird is good."

Still, that unresounding key was enough to stop her from playing her last song ("The Darkest Night Of All") in an all-too-short 30-minute set. Despite repeated calls to play something else, she politely declined and left the stage.

My companion had never even heard of Lisa Germano until this night, but left thoroughly impressed.

Me too.