Everyone's Victim: Lisa Germano

Woody Allen calls them "kamikaze women": women ever on the collision course, always ready to crash their planes�and ready to crash them right into you. Years before the affected wilt of Chan Marshall, Lisa Germano gave a powerful voice to this tempestuous breed�a heart-tugged, empathic mess of addiction, id, and slight despair.

Germano's unlikely musical career began, in all places, as the violinist/fiddle player for John Mellencamp's Lonesome Jubilee band�a roll she happily fulfilled for seven years. After countless hours of session work with a number of high profile (and similarly adult-contemporary) artists, Germano decided, at the age of 30, to begin recording her debut solo record in 1991. On the Way Down From the Moon Palace resulted, a self-released full-length that fits a little too comfortably in line with her past musical associations for my tastes�but was enough to garner the attention (and, more importantly, the pocketbook) of Capitol Records, who soon signed Germano for the release of her next record.

It wasn't until Happiness, her major label debut, that Germano unleashed the beginnings of what was to become the trademark sound�a mix of confused, ethereal wash and rasped, muttered desperation�that would see her through the length of her solo career. It's self-deprecation in spades; with depression, self-involvement, cynicism, and ambivalence adding up to a promising (if disjointed) sophomore rebirth. The record sold alright, but Germano wasn't satisfied with the final cut nor her label's meddlings, and in an unprecedented move, jumped ship for celebrated British "indie" 4AD�re-sequencing and expanding the record, and re-releasing it the following year.

That same year, Germano and 4AD released the record that would come to define Germano's creative peak�the critically-acclaimed, landmark concept record Geek The Girl. Easily among my favorite records of that decade, Geek is a chronicle of one girl's emotional and sexual awakening�a dark and disturbing narrative of willful manipulation, obsession, and, of course, desperate melancholy. the linernotes, however artless describe it as follows: "...a girl who is confused about how to be sexual and cool in the world but finds out she isn't cool and gets constantly taken advantage of sexually, gets kind of sick and enjoys giving up but at the end still tries to believe in something beautiful and dreams of still loving a man in hopes that he can save her from her shit life"). The songs are innocently confused, with awkward, stuttered sentimentality recalling the strains of adolescence�while traversing the weight of adulthood. The record's conceptual linchpin is an autobiographical tale of a stalker's attack called "...a psychopath," which mixes samples of a goose-bumping call to a 911 operator with the lyrics:

a baseball bat beside my bed
a thing of mace
I'll wait around
I hear a noise
well I hear something
you win again
I'm paralyzed

Geek the Girl is sad, sloppy, sort of unhinged�but like the best of her work, a convincingly bittersweet damnation of humanity's greatest curse�the indelible specter of hope.

The records that followed Geek�the convincing rollercoaster of 1996s Excerpts From a Love Circus, and all-to-crystal clear Slide from 1998� failed to really expand upon their predecessor's stark, brilliant vision�though each do contain some fine moments. Between the two albums, Germano took time out to record a record called Slush with the fellows from Giant Sand and Calexico under the name OP8�a record I have unfortunately never heard, despite a number of recommendations.

Following the surely disappointing Slide, Germano retired from solo performance, and was quickly dropped from 4AD. She moved to L.A. in 1999 to become a clerk at a book store�doing occasional session work with David Bowie, Neil Finn, that dog.'s Anna Wornaker, Iggy Pop, Sheryl Crow, and Jewel.

In 2003 she returned with Lullaby For the Liquid Pig, her best work since Geek�on ArtistDirect's ineffable label. another concept record, Lullaby focuses on ambivalence in addictions�and ultimately, as always, desperate hope. I'm not sure what the future holds, as I think ArtistDirect has already gone belly up�but with any luck, Germano will continue her current stride. Her music does, admittedly, sometimes teeter on the brink of Adult Contempo�and (painful as it might be to admit) even Tori Amos comparisons aren't particularly far-fetched. but non-the-less, her career of near-relentless misery and self-defeat in face of commercial success could very well earn her the title of Greatest Trainwreck of All Time.