May 2010

It would be easy to misconstrue Lissie. Slight and blonde, a pretty, guitar-playing slip-of-a-thing, you might easily take her for a sweet Midwestern girl, a freckled balladeer borne of milk and cookies and cornfields.

More fool you. For all the flaxen hair and big blue eyes, this girl is smart and gutsy and tough, with a big old voice to match it: Stevie Nicks taking Neko Case by the scruff of the neck, Laurel Canyon prettiness stewed in campfire and bourbon; there is, after all, a certain vocal quality that only a decade of beer and cigarettes can bring.

She was born in Rock Island, Illinois, one of the Quad Cities, on the banks of the Mississippi River. It's the city that inspired Rock Island Line, and that bore Bix Beiderbecke, it's the stuff of spring floods and pick-up trucks and bona fide blue collar country music. She was also the family tearaway; trouble, it seemed, had a knack of following Lissie. From once dyeing her hair with pen ink in 6th grade, cutting class, talking back, eventually getting thrown out of High School for spitting in a teacher's face. "I felt that people didn't know what to do with me, and tried to squash my spirit a little, which gave rise to a defiant streak within me early on," she concedes. "It was that that made me bend my ideas around convention" But all the while she was still humming, still writing songs; she taught herself a handful of guitar chords, wrote about the girls who snubbed her and the boys who broke her and all the scrapes she got herself into, and played them out loud at the local coffee shop where she worked, dreaming of the big city and leaving her small Midwestern town.

In the spring of 2006 she moved to LA and started her own night with musician friends at a bar called Crane's Hollywood Tavern in her neighbourhood, which she named Beachwood Rockers' Society.

Little by little things seemed to come together; she recorded a five-track EP named Why You Runnin' with her friend Bill Reynolds of Band of Horses that caught something of a fire in the States last year. She headed to Nashville to record with Jacquire King (who was fresh from working with the Kings of Leon). What came out of it was the bulk of her debut album, Catching A Tiger; 12 songs that range from bluesy-folk to unfettered pop and showcase both her remarkable voice and her songwriting chops.

"Lissie has the voice, the songs and the image to be huge in 2010...A talent way too big for just one canyon." – Sunday Times

"One of the year's true finds, Lissie maintains the flame for the true rebel country spirit with her finely-etched songs and smokey vocals" – The Mirror

"Lissie draws comparisons to Stevie Nicks and Chrissie Hynde, but is also able to transcend the past to become a present day icon for lovers of both blues, folk, and country." - Q Magazine

"Guitar-toting LA freeway rock" - The Guardian