When Lissie exploded onto the scene in 2010 with her album Catching a Tiger, the Joss Stone, Janis Joplin, Grace Slick comparisons were the ones that were most thrown out, but journalists ran the gamut of clichéd comparisons like they always do. Lissie is a heavy smoker, with the throaty rasp that’s so appealing to listeners and she’s a rocker, not merely some pop ingénue, which makes her an oddity to some. What it also makes her is a commodity for the record companies. Rocker women flow in and out of music with unsympathetic labels attached to their names. Joan Osbourne, Jewel, Courtney Love and Sheryl Crow were all considered “rockers” at one point, but have floundered partly because they couldn’t adapt to divergent audience appeal. It’s a crushing business that much like Darwinian science shows that only the strongest and savviest survive.
That leads me to Lissie’s latest EP Covered Up With Flowers, an album of five covers that showcases a different side of the singer. It broadens her appeal to a new realm and keeps her relevant much like a rapper does with a mixtape. While it isn’t the most enlightening piece of work, it is fun and shows a side of Lissie that we haven’t seen. She performs five songs by artists so different that the Grammy’s might be the only place you’d find them in the same room together. Songs include Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness” and Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance,” which turns out to be a halfway decent song without the Gaga stigma attached.
Could this be Lissie trying to branch out to a bigger audience? Perhaps, but it could also be her proving that she isn’t stagnant. Covering a hip-hop track with a guitar is all the rage these days, but covering an up and comer like Kid Cudi shows some panache. Again, we get into that savvy mindset she seems to have. The third song is “Games People Play” by Joe South a country/folk/pop crossover song from 1969 that is yet another genre tackled. The biggest surprise, though, is the cover of Metallica’s classic “Nothing Else Matters.” We all remember the longhaired James Hetfield practically screaming the chorus and thinking to ourselves, “There’s no one else that can sing this song. It can’t be done.” We were wrong.
Lissie kills it and while she’s obviously not Hetfield, she does rock the hell out of the song. With such a promising career on the horizon, the hope here is that Lissie keeps releasing great music that appeals to men and women alike. This EP is simply a microcosm of a broader style that I hope to see more women attempting. The rock/indie scene is so bereft of women that truly let loose vocally and it is one of the saddest things in music today. For every five Adele’s, Lady Gaga’s Or Colbie Caillat’s there is merely one Lissie. Here’s hoping that changes a bit, we’re due.
