“I had been spending a lot of my down times on hikes and walks,” explains Portland, Maine songwriter Liza Victoria. “Nature became something vital to my heart both in healing and health.” Recording under the moniker Lisa/Liza, Victoria has made her name crafting contemplative folk music rooted in the natural world. Released via Orindal Records, full-length Deserts of Youth and follow-up Momentary Glance drew upon the environment both in terms of style and substance. Deliberate, unhurried songs made in the image of nature’s patient rhythms, songs that examined how surrounding landscapes are tied to our most intimate emotions and memories. How the past is coded into the world around us, and how the fact is both so beautiful and so sad.
This month Lisa/Liza returns with a brand new full length, Shelter of a Song. Again to be released via Orindal, the record is not only a continuation of these themes, but their most detailed, hopeful application yet. A hope derived from the conditions in which the album was crafted, a feeling felt and lived more keenly than before, a counterpoint to life’s darkest recesses. “These songs were written while dealing with chronic illness,” Victoria explains. “When I was actively writing in these last two years, it was often in my strongest moments of healing, which has made this album a different process for me than others before it. The times when I felt well enough to sit with music allowed me a new kind of joy, because of these struggles with health.”
In this manner, Shelter of a Song lives up to its name. Each track is a refuge of its own, a moment plucked from the present and preserved, available now to step into and explore anew. Victoria’s poetic style has the uncanny ability to sound fundamentally personal yet universal too, as though within the specificities of her own experiences she invokes equivalent or adjacent memories in whomever happens to listen. “My vision and hope for this collection of songs is they would allow room for the listener to find their own interpretations,” Victoria continues, “similar to how someone might make a quilt where each piece holds personal connection but in its use it takes on additional shape.”
So when Victoria says she enjoys writing about her surroundings “as a way to preserve memory or draw out memory from my past,” she is not referring to pure retreat or escape. Rather, she uses the past to situate herself more fully in the present, be it through the wisdom of context or the reassurance that relinquishing a past does not mean to lose it. “Perhaps in preserving these memories in song, I’m allowed some small agency to let them go,” she continues, “as I know I can come back to them again.” If the album is a quilt, then it is one with a dual purpose—offering an immediate warmth to those who need it, and an intricate history for those with the time and inclination to examine its details.
“Writing these songs helped me to affirm moments of peace and resolution,” Victoria concludes. “Writing music is a place of great comfort for me, and it has only become more apparent to me how great a companion it is.” Like the natural world that informs them, the songs of Lisa/Liza come to represent an alternate space, one outside of everyday suffering and worry. A place not free of pain, but insulated against its usual immediacy. A shelter where memories can be returned to, and where suffering is something akin to rain on a roof—evidently present but unable to soak you through, serving only to reinforce the gentle joy of dryness and warmth.
Photos by Alexa Clavette