Rooster Walk organizer Johnny Buck recently sat down for an in-depth interview with Chapel Hill siren Lizzy Ross. The 23-year-old singer/songwriter is currently in the studio with her band working on an album that’s expected to drop in mid-June.
The Lizzy Ross Band will perform at Rooster Walk 3 in Martinsville, Va., from 3-4 p.m. on Saturday, May 28th. Lizzy will also take part in a songwriter’s workshop the same day beginning at 1 p.m.
A 2009 graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Ross has a unique perspective on the music industry. A philosophy major with minors in music and entrepreneurship, she is conscious of the artistic requirements, as well as the business side, of her current line of work.
In this wide-ranging interview, the Anapolis, Md., native who draws favorable comparisons to Grace Potter and Janis Joplin discusses a childhood addiction to singing, Bruce Springsteen’s penchant for railroad songs and her efforts to channel other great female vocalists without trying to imitate them.
Rooster Walk: When did you start singing?
Lizzy Ross: I was always singing. When I was little, I wouldn’t talk to people, I would sing and they would tell people that I was the little mermaid. I just sang all the time. I got in trouble in school for singing all the time without realizing I was doing it. It was just no filter between my brain and singing out loud, and finally I figured out how to control myself like everybody else does. There’s always that annoying kid in class that’s humming all the time, and you’re like, “Oh my God.” But yeah. I started to sing publicly probably high school musicals, stuff like that.
RW: When did you realize, or when did someone tell you, that you had a special voice compared to other girls your age?
LR: I don’t know. I can remember being really little, like riding the train up to New York to see my dad, and I was doing that thing that I did where I was singing without realizing it and there’s a dude a couple seats back and I was with my stepmom, and he came up to her and he told her, I was probably like 5 or 6, he said, “You need to get this girl voice lessons. I’m a casting director. I work casting Broadway plays and you need to teach her how to do this.” Which, I think, you can interpret very badly (laughs) I think, but he was saying there’s something here if you develop it. It could be something.
RW: Did you get voice lessons as a kid?
LR: No. I never did. Although I would like to because I think there’s a lot to learn. I just don’t seem to have the money or the time to do it. Mostly the money. I would love to though.
RW: You grew up in Maryland but went to college at UNC-Chapel Hill, which is still kind of your “home base.” Any particular reason you went with the Tar Heels?
LR: I had checked out a number of schools, and I had some friends down here. I have family down here, and I came down to check it out and visit. I really like it and, you know, when everything rolled around and the options came up it was clearly the most fantastic place in terms of the place itself, the people, the weather, the classes, what I wanted to study. I wanted to study philosophy and they have a really good program at UNC. And (low) tuititon man, it was a great combination. Definitely not being in debt from school has enabled being able to do something as silly as playing music. I appreciate that.
RW: You were a philosophy major then? Did you have a minor?
LR: I minored in music and entrepreneurship.
RW: Was that because you knew you wanted to do the music thing as a career?
LR: You know, I’m not really sure what it was. I think that I did the entrepreneurship program because I had a couple friends in the program, and I liked the professors. I just started taking the classes, and then I realized that I pretty much had finished the minor without realizing it. The same thing happened with music, sort of. I was about three classes away, and I realized that I only had to take (making up examples) women and opera and music theory level three, and I would be done. I think they were kind of innate interests that came together in these strangely conspicuous ways and have now congealed into my life.
RW: Your music minor, was this performance? Vocal training?
LR: I wasn’t singing. I was actually playing the guitar. A lot of it was theory and the performance elements were guitar.
It’s been incredibly heartening and inspiring to have the success that we have had. People have treated us really well and received us really well, and we have a lot fun. So we’re encouraged and looking forward to continuing to soldier on and keep putting our guts and our hearts and our souls into what we’re doing. There’s nothing quite as rewarding as actualizing something that you creatively imagined and hearing it.
RW: Why guitar and not voice?
LR: One of the hard things I’ve encountered when looking for vocal lessons was that there aren’t as many people who teach my vocal style. A lot of people teach classical or Broadway style, and that’s very much not how I sing. And so in the department I knew it was going to be really classically focused curriculum and that was the opposite of a lot of things I was doing vocally. I also just wanted to learn more about the guitar. I felt like my strengths on the guitar, compared to my vocal strengths, could use some beefing up. The other thing is vocals come really naturally, and guitar gives me an opportunity to think more about how the sounds are made and the process behind getting sound to come out of an instrument and understanding the theory behind it, because to sing something all I have to do is hear it, but to play something, there’s more examination in that. That yielded a greater knowledge for me.
RW: And you graduated from UNC in May of 2010?
LR: I actually graduated in December of 2009 because I wanted to get the heck out of there and start playing music. (Laughs)
RW: Once you graduated, was that really the first time in your life you were able to be a full-time musician. I know you were playing on the side during school, but you’ve been at it full time as a career, haven’t you, since you graduated?
LR: Yeah. I had been playing in a band, and I started my own project around October (2009). And by the time I graduated in December, we were pretty much ready to go in January. So I started hitting it pretty hard, first doing solo stuff and as the band got its legs more and more, we started to branch out and grow more and now we’re getting ready to release a full band album, which is really exciting.
RW: Talk to me a little about these past 18 months out of school, on the road. What has it been like?
LR: In some ways, it stills feels the same (as school). You have to apply the same amount of pressure to yourself to get things done. The entrepreneurial aspect is you that you’ve gotta kick your own butt a little bit to make things happen. But it’s been really fun. It’s been incredibly heartening and inspiring to have the success that we have had. People have treated us really well and received us really well, and we have a lot fun. So we’re encouraged and looking forward to continuing to soldier on and keep putting our guts and our hearts and our souls into what we’re doing. There’s nothing quite as rewarding as actualizing something that you creatively imagined and hearing it.
RW: What are some of the highlights or moments in time in this last year-and-a-half of touring, whether it’s a particular gig or particular road trip, are there any memorable events from your time with the band or playing with the band so far?
LR: That’s a great question cause it seems like one of the things with having a band is you have a group of people who really love music. If you’re lucky, it’s a group of people who are really dedicated to working together and making music together and being creative. You’re hanging out a lot and you’re working hard together a lot, so that, combined with this strange environment, where you’re hustling and trying to make things happen, yields a lot of funny, funny, sometimes fantastic, sometimes awkward, sometimes terrible kinda moments. I know Rooster Walk, which is funny because you’re actually asking me this question, we met Big Fat Gap, which they’re good friends of ours now, and we play with them a lot. They were in the same town that we were in, but we met them at Rooster Walk last year. I think I was falling asleep at midnight or something, and I must have heard someone, but we were out camping, and I heard someone. I got up and was like, “What’s going on. What is this noise. I just want to go to bed,” and I ended up staying up until like 5 in the morning, hanging out and talking with these guys in Big Fat Gap. The whole band did, and we had so much fun.
RW: I’ve seen a lot of different attempts from people trying to describe the band’s kind of music. How would you describe the genre or style of music you guys produce?
LR: I think I’ve come to Americana as our sort of primary title which is sort of a cop out, because what is Americana really? I don’t know … Bruce Springsteen singing about railroads? But what we do to specify that is we say rock and roll, jazz and country. Those all have strong American elements in them. Our rhythmic heritage comes form New Orleans jazz. A lot of the stuff we do melodically comes from country-slash-bluegrass styles. My vocal style is soul, and you put it all together and you get rock. Therefore you’ve got Americana. We’ve got to come up with something that’s less than twenty words to describe that.
RW: Your voice has been described as being similar to Janis Joplin, Grace Slick, Grace Potter, several others. Obviously you have your own distinctive voice but do you feel one of those is more accurate than any of the others, or is there one that I didn’t even mention that you feel is more…
LR: I don’t know. It’s funny. It’s hard to make these comparisons because I always feel really prideful or something comparing myself to these famous artists because they’re really great musicians. I certainly learned a lot from all of those people. There are elements of their vocal styles I like to incorporate into what I’m doing. Grace Slick has such a powerful, almost wall of sound, that she pushed forward with such great force and Janis Joplin had such a raw quality. People will say sometimes Joni Mitchell with such clear high notes, I feel like there are small parts of each of those people’s vocal styles that I learned from and try to incorporate into what I’m doing, but I don’t really know. I think it just kind of depends on the song. We have different material. If I’m singing a very quiet song, a song like “Needle and Thread,” maybe I’ll try to go more in a direction that would be of Joni Mitchell or Nora Jones. If we’re singing a really wild, loud song like “Bones,” you’re gonna get more like Janis Joplin, Grace Potter, Grace Slick. I don’t know. I just try to learn from the way that all of those ladies used their amazing voices. Patty Griffin is really a great singer too, and, I think, someone who inspired me a lot and continues to.
RW: In certain songs do you find yourself trying to kind of channel or imitate a certain vocalist?
LR: The re-creation thing is always really hard because generally, when you try to imitate or recreate something, it doesn’t sound good. It’s like a cheap imitation, so there’s got to be a way to assimilate pieces of those styles that you love into what you’re doing and incorporate it so that it feels fresh and it also touches on the timeless classic sort of motifs of music that everybody responds to. But yeah we try to do that in certain ways, but we don’t try to make carbon copies.
Editor’s Note: For more information on Lizzy and her talented band, visit www.lizzy.net. There, you’ll find free song downloads as well as a link to buy her current solo album, “Traces.”
