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Lisa aims for new highs with her latest album

Singer songwriter Lisa Richards… “I had never had any dreams, or hopes, or goals except to get high and stay high until I died.”

DEFYING gravity is a byword for singer songwriter Lisa Richards. Not only is “Waiting to Fly” the title of her eighth album, borne out of repeated lockdowns and isolation, but her launch later this month will be a musical celebration of “taking flight” with her own songs and stories.

But defying gravity also has a darker side for Richards who, speaking of her youthful years of addiction to anything she could lay her hands on, says: “I had never had any dreams, or hopes, or goals except to get high and stay high until I died.”

If you listen to Richards’ voice, you’ll never forget it. Described by critics as “both ferocious and sweet”, it has a strange mixture of thinness and depth. When I catch up with her, I ask how she views it.

“It’s the only voice I’ve ever known so that I can only tell you where other people put me,” she says. 

“Some people compare me to Bjork or Joanna Newsom, but I see myself as singing a mongrel mix of folk, jazz and blues – a different voice.”

She’s noticed many people sing in a different voice from the one they speak with, meaning that the singing voice must be affected. 

“With me, I don’t do that… I think people find that refreshing,” she says.

At 59, Richards says she’s beginning to feel grown-up. After 22 years living in the US, she fell in love with a Canberran, now her husband, and has lived here for nine years. 

When we talk, I hear an Aussie accent, but she says some people think she has one and some think she doesn’t, adding, “voice is always a subject of great consideration for me”. 

When young, she used to get in trouble for sounding too Townsville – that’s where she was born – but now people think English isn’t her first language.

Richards’ troubled Townsville youth is well behind her. The daughter of a psychiatrist, she was introduced to antipsychotic drugs as a girl of four or five years old, given in the belief that if one medicated children, it would calm them down.

“The first time I got drunk… I was seven and I didn’t have much supervision. I was very unhappy so I started to look for an escape.” 

At 20, she headed south, busked in Kings Cross, imbibed any substance she could get, then went to rehab at 26. 

“Music was my escape, but I didn’t practice it until I was an adult, although my mother had been a pianist,” she says.

Encouraged by a drummer friend, she left Australia for New York without a Green Card, then visited the South By Southwest Conference in Austin, Texas where, she says, “it felt like home, it opened up a whole world… It was about real music-making, not superstars. It broadened my vision”.

She was married to a bass player there for 14 years, all the while maintaining her sobriety. 

She’s been nine years in Canberra now and has learnt that it doesn’t matter where you live, you can have a good life if you put yourself to it. 

“The arts scene here is very different, and I think it’s growing and getting stronger,” she says. “ It’s taken me a long time to get connected, but now I am.”

Mind you, she has reached out to American contacts, too, sourcing southern Californian-based percussionist Larry Salzman and touring guitarist Clint Wells for her new album “Waiting to Fly” and yes, the acronym is WTF.

These days Richards’ songs are about defying the low moments, so when people say she sings the blues, she know a true-blues aficionado would not agree “because the blues are about the highs and the lows, but the way I sing is very much cabaret with a bluesy touch”.

Now with the release of her new album, Richards is ready to fly.

“I’ve had more highs being a composer than I ever did,” she says, 

Lisa Richards, Street Theatre, November 26. 

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Helen Musa

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