“All this time / I was building a garden,” sings Lisa Victoria on ‘Held Together’, “I was waiting for rainfall.” The track is the lead single from Victoria’s Lisa/Liza project’s latest album Breaking and Mending, out via Orindal Records. Those simple lines encapsulate the spirit of a release built around the experience of living with chronic illness. A hushed folk style loaded with compassion, frustration and fear, delivered with something like faith. For it takes belief to tend a garden, to put weeks, months or years of effort into something subject to unpredictable rhythms. The rain might never come, the frosts might return out of season, yet still you take yourself out into the open air, get to your knees and dig.
The roots of this faith can be traced back to recent single ‘Rose Pedals‘, released as part of Mexican Summer‘s Looking Glass project. Something of a precursor to Breaking and Mending which captured the duality at the heart of the present form of Lisa/Liza. Where a wish to move through suffering is matched by a determination to experience such moments in a more mindful, patient manner. To be kind to oneself in the present moment without reducing life to that one instance. To offer a hopeful image of living with pain without hiding the frustrations and tensions which accompany it.
The therapeutic quality of making music within such an experience concerned much of the previous Lisa/Liza album, Shelter of a Song too. “A shelter where memories can be returned to,” as we described in our review, “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.” But more than offering direct comfort during difficult moments, the album spoke to art’s ability to engender a sense of agency through the process of capturing and then releasing these experiences. “Writing these songs helped me to affirm moments of peace and resolution,” as Victoria explained. And if the path to peace leads from an initial act of acknowledgement, then songs can be the point of origin. Preservation as an act of letting go.
Breaking and Mending emerges from this understanding, underlining its importance and imperfection in order to (re)construct an authentic sense of self within an otherwise alienating period. “Music was a friend to me,” Victoria explains, the writing process occurring amid a loneliness brought by illness and trauma. “These songs were a result of those experiences. When I hear them, I think that maybe I put more of myself into these songs than I have into any other album.” Opener ‘Felt Twice’ demonstrates how this results in a full picture of Victoria’s interior weather patterns, capturing not only that aforementioned sense of perseverance, but also the attached doubt, longing and frustration which are just as much a part of her as any other.
They tell me “the body minds”,
said that, the mind was the body,
Well each time that I fell,
I felt twice,
What else can I tell everybody?
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The songs’ candid nature makes for what might be the most concise Lisa/Liza record to date, but also the most varied in its emotional terrain. As though Victoria has come to trust that the warmth and refuge of her work is not undermined by honesty, and furthermore to understand that any worthwhile act of self-reconstruction cannot leave any parts at the side. Which is why ‘Felt Twice’ is comfortable in voicing its questions so directly, and how the idyllic ‘Kiss the Flowers’ and its overt imagery of peace can follow the explicit struggle of ‘Fight For You’.
“See stars & wonder, / Why are we waiting?” Victoria asks on the title track. “Love overtaken, why are we wasting more time? / more time.” The delivery is every bit as gentle as any other Lisa/Liza song, but there’s an inherent impatience prickling the docile flow. A mood which doesn’t undermine the track’s unhurried compassion so much as underscore its sincerity, as though remembering from within a state of fatigue the reasons to rest and heal. A clarity triggered by the sight of a wild fox or a song by John Prine or Judee Sill.
Write a song for the bliss,
Judee Sill and The Kiss.Breaking and Mending,
light that’s worth bending,
Towards the sun, again.
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With Breaking and Mending, Lisa/Liza captures the patience required in learning to live with suffering. Be it borne of chronic illness or trauma or the slow weight of passing time. But also the hope that there is reason to weather such conditions. A faith retained through all challenges, much in the same way a tree stands patient despite surely longing for its leaves through the cold of the winter months. And in refusing to sterilize this picture of its contradictions, Liza Victoria reclaims herself from flattening binaries so that others might do so too. Illness and health, loneliness and love, none of these things are simple. And the act of being yourself while living through them is a not a linear process, but an act of breaking, mending.
Breaking and Mending is out now via Orindal Records and you can get it from the Lisa/Liza Bandcamp page.
Photos by Alexa Clavette