Lisa/Liza - Breaking and Mending (2023)

You may be more familiar with Lisa/Liza than you know, if you’ve ever tromped home through the pines as nighttime kicks in, or taken in a long breath as the midday sun warmed your face.

Lisa/Liza is the songwriting project of Liza Victoria, developed within Maine’s strange and wonderful DIY music scene. She has toured nationally with Jens Lekman and Advance Base and shared bills with Angel Olsen, Kaki King, Lucy Dacus, and Julie Byrne.

Lisa/Liza’s catalog spans ten years, with four albums on Orindal Records, a single released through Mexican Summer’s Looking Glass, and a spate of self-released home recordings. Her songwriting invites traditional folk guitar-playing and lyricism into dream-like domains, directing memory’s imperfections toward restoration and healing.

On her latest album, Breaking and Mending, the heavy, open-ended waltzes of her past work assume a more linear form, as Lisa/Liza carries on her tradition of shedding light on personal trauma and life’s greater mysteries through song. Questions about love and the natural world are met with moments of clarity, sparked by recollections of Judee Sill or John Prine. Above all, Breaking and Mending deals in dualities and the beauty of self-reconstruction, as carefully underlined in the opening track, “Felt Twice”:

They tell me “the body minds,”
they said that, the mind was the body,
Well each time that I fell,
I felt twice,
What else can I tell everybody?