Spotlight: Letting Small Decisions Lead Her to Beautiful Things, Liza Anne Talks Getting Back on Tour, Catharsis & More
DESPITE LIFE BEING BIZARRE AND SERENDIPITOUS ALL AT ONCE LATELY — at the moment, Liza Anne manages to stay lucid.
In a town full of endless creative pursuits buzzling at every turn of a corner, Anne somehow manages to always be one step ahead of herself. A frequent guest of her friends’ shows, when she is not busy managing tour or finishing up her three albums in the vault, she also hosts several crafty art gatherings in various collaborations with local communities.
She’s busy even on her time off, so when the singer-songwriter got involved in a motorcycle crash just days ahead of her first tour out of the pandemic, it seemed like an all-so-timely sign from the universe telling her to “slow down.”
“I went to the emergency room and they were like, ‘You have a concussion. You should probably take two weeks off your nine-to-five,’” she recalls on her phone call interview with LUNA. “But I don’t have a nine-to-five. My entire job is flailing my body around, and I get to do it starting tomorrow for the first time in two years. So, no, I didn’t take time off.”
The crash itself was in no way mild, but luckily the concussion was. Still, with all the confusing and dazing side effects that come with a concussion, it made tour-managing herself that much harder. Anne ended up flying to Los Angeles for her first show, breaking her original plan of road-tripping along with her bandmates. While a four-day break doesn’t sound like much for someone with a nine-to-five, it certainly came as a rarity for the self-managing artist. Anne still felt dissociative from time to time during her two weeks on tour, and had trouble with wrist pain that certainly didn't help her play guitar.
“I was really in rebellion with my body,” she says half-jokingly, “because I was like, ‘I have waited two years to do this, I'm just gonna do it.’ In the middle of the first set, [I] ripped my wrist brace off — and it was just stupid. I got off stage after the LA show and thought, ‘How am I gonna do this for a month? This is really shitty.’”
Fast forward to a month later, and we now know that it all worked out. Besides one canceled show and the inevitable nausea that came with the concussion upon loud noises and big stressors, Anne’s first national tour in two years went smoothly. But even with her injury out of the equation, “Bad Vacation One Night Only Fourteen Times” was full of the unexpected. Had the pandemic never occurred, the tour would have happened two years prior. In fact, while the tour’s title album, Bad Vacation, came out during the pioneer pandemic year, Liza Anne wrote the 12 tracks four years ago.
“I feel like our lives are full of repetitive lessons until you learn them,” Anne says regarding the introspective, at times explosive, and chromatic 2020 album. “I think it'll always be relevant for me, [in the sense of] being curious about and being explorative towards my relationship with myself. There was a sense of pride [for] how far I’ve come; also a humbling sense of I’m still learning. And I always use my shows as a form of exposure therapy, so it just felt good to be back in that zone. Because there's really no other thing in life for me that gives me that experience — it's such a catharsis.”
All in one, Bad Vacation embodies this sense of cathartic, repetitive lessons. Anne spends much of the album airing out her own dirty laundry, telling stories from ghosting your therapist to realizing the worst person towards you is none other than yourself; kissing friends after tequila to realizing how far out of control everything has gotten. While most of these subject matters don’t stray far from the typical Liza Anne formula, Bad Vacation challenges her previous sound in quite a courageous fashion. Art pop, surf rock, or something else, it certainly isn’t folk, what her music is still constantly being coined as by music reviewers.
“I'm always gonna make what will be my favorite record of that year,” Anne describes. “I’m writing about my own life, and I use the sonic landscape to articulate the emotions. I don’t ever want to be cornered into a place where people are expecting the same record four times in a row. I would get really bored with that.”
Photos By Gomi Zhou
She continues, explaining, “There will always be a common thread of me producing and writing my own music. If you’re doing it for other people, they don’t have to sing the songs every night. You create your own niche for yourself, then you attract what you are, and you just hope that people [will] find you because they want to find more of themselves.”
In her art community in Nashville, Anne did just that. “The grass grows where you water it,” she describes of the past 10 years of her time in the city. “I’ve been watering this grass by living here for 10 years, and I’m looking around to see this garden of friendships that are deeper than I expected them to be: a sense of home and a creative community that feels healthy, beautiful, and mutually beneficial for each other. I feel very supported and grounded here.”
But, of course, this also comes with being in the same place for a decade, and Nashville has a fair share of ups and downs for Anne. Besides her joking mention of, “Oh, if we only had this conversation four months ago…” even just between the time of the release of Bad Vacation and the current year, two bumpy themes stand out: going sober and coming to terms with the pandemic.
Anne went sober right before the pandemic — of course, not knowing the fact that life would shut down soon — and she has been sober ever since. It was a particularly hard decision to come to in a music business town like Nashville, but it has only benefited Anne.
“I am way stronger and more consistent,” she describes of her journey thus far. “Those two years [in the pandemic] were such a gift for me to really wrap my brain around sobriety in a way that almost felt like there was this built-in intensive time to just deal with ourselves, our brains, our bodies, and our mental health. I had so many ego deaths over the course of two years. There were so many moments of getting to know myself better and what I like and hate about my job, what I want to do more or do less. Being sober in that time just made it way easier for me.”
But, of course, everything about the pandemic is tricky business.
“There’s two sides of it,” Anne begins, laying out her dilemma while reflecting on the lockdown and the pandemic. “The interpersonal side was nearly all positive in the sense [that] it was terrible. It was terrible in that there was no distraction, in which I grew a healthier connection to my mental health; my connection to my family and friends. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”
She recalls living like a suburban mom in 2020, waking up naturally at 9 a.m., making homemade juice, then watching the Drew Barrymore show and doodling for a couple hours. Yet, that kind of peace felt almost like a fever dream, looking back with a sense of inevitable curiosity towards the lost time Anne has regarding any lost potentials towards Bad Vacation and canceled tours. “However, for business and life goals,” she says, “[in terms of] where I thought I would be at 28 years old, that is a grief that I think I am still living through, and one that I have to go easy on myself.”
Still, the sense of self-realization Anne earned transpires itself as new music and new appreciation. “I did write almost three new albums in the pandemic,” Anne describes. “And I’ve already made one of them. I spent so much time writing poetry, taking long walks, and listening to podcasts. There’s just so much proof that when you give your brain space to slow down — once the noise really does quiet — you really do find so many corners of quieter life that are so bright and vibrant.”
But she also recognizes the duality of it all: “Now I’m starting to tour again, [and] I’m starting to love and find joy in all the louder, larger moments.”
Lately, Anne realizes how she can be such an optimistic opportunist sometimes. She catches herself ascribing meaning and expansion to her experiences, from the more defining events like the motorcycle crash to the everyday, coffee-shop-selection kinds of decisions she has to make. Recalling her recent appreciation of the movie, Everything Everywhere All At Once, she reflects, “I feel like I’m in a very sensitive and open place to just be present in my life. I just feel very aware of a lot of small decisions that are leading me to very beautiful things.”
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