LISA/LIZA - Shelter of a Song LP (teal)
"Lisa/Liza is the songwriting project of Portland Maine singer and guitarist Liza Victoria. Throughout her new album, Shelter of a Song, Liza affirms the value of music and songwriting in her life, providing her comfort through illness and isolation, and helping her to hold onto cherished memories through the poetry she sings.
Shelter of a Song was recorded in the kitchen of a Central Maine studio apartment with engineering assistance from Peter Herman. All takes were recorded live, capturing the immediacy and quiet power of Liza’s hushed vocals and fingerstyle acoustic guitar. The album’s eight original songs are gentle meditations on joy, pain, human relationships and the natural world that stretch out slowly like long shadows."
Liza explains:
“These songs were written while dealing with chronic illness. When I was actively writing in these last two years, it was often in my strongest moments of healing, which has made this album a different process for me than others before it. The times when I felt well enough to sit with music allowed me a new kind of joy, because of these struggles with health. My vision and hope for this collection of songs is they would allow room for the listener to find their own interpretations, similar to how someone might make a quilt where each piece holds personal connection but in its use it takes on additional shape.”
Liza’s lyrics conjure vivid images of everyday beauty: a dog rolling in the grass on a nice day; walking down a darkened street to meet the sunrise; robins filling up a field. The natural world holds a strong place in these songs, providing much of the album’s optimism as bright and dreamlike descriptions of flora, fauna and celestial bodies are plainsung over muted strums and arpeggiated guitar patterns.
"Shelter of a Song shines with its own dim lit glow and comfort that comes from a place of patience and introspection. Built on an ever growing stretch of atmosphere and spacious delivery, Liza Victoria’s songs look into the depths of mourning and loss, reworking those feelings into a meditative beauty, full of reflection and a mesmerizing folk splendor. It’s heavy in terms of emotional weight, but all around stunning and full of welcome calm." — Post-Trash
"Shelter of a Song reaffirms (Liza) Victoria as a truly unique talent, her knack for writing bare-there, weaving folk songs as mesmerizing as ever before... the music here appears weightless and yet it holds great power, like the impress of a dream, like snow falling at night." — GoldFlakePaint (Issue 7)