Lisa Genee
“I’ll be your angel and you can be my saint.” The beginning to the chorus of Lisa Genee’s “Tangled” reveals a desire not for perfection, but rather for understanding and acceptance.
After moving from British Columbia, Canada to Pennsylvania at age three, Genee grew up immersed in books, nature and music. The latter has challenged, healed and shaped her like nothing else.
Genee is a songwriter first, simply because she has led an extraordinary life that has taken her to places she would neither dream nor hope she’d go. Tangled, for certain, but slowly unwrapping herself in front of a two-way mirror that has yet to fully reveal itself on the other side.
Genee is selfish about her music in the sense that she writes as a means to decipher, come to grips with and celebrate her own unique path. It’s quite personal, although she doesn’t write in Hieroglyphics. She lays everything out for her listeners; just don’t expect her to explain every last detail.
“My music is for me,” she says. “Writing what I write is like a need; I have to as much as I need air, to eat and sleep.”
“Not in the neurotic sense, but it’s in my soul.”
Genee’s musicianship is a mere bonus. A classically trained pianist with a vast understanding of guitar, Genee has worked diligently on growing her voice into a sweet swagger that can be lovely breathy or cannonball powerful.
While she often makes things appear effortless, little has come easy for Genee.
Genee’s grandmother, Marie Conway, was a model and violinist/violist who performed in the Ziegfield Follies on Broadway as well as New York’s Center Symphony Orchestra. Conway, a stunning beauty with a lively spirit, was Genee’s first muse.
When Genee was six years old, Schuster began teaching her granddaughter the piano. This was a challenge, not because of Genee’s unwillingness to practice, but due to her ambition. Genee immediately wanted to learn more difficult classical pieces rather than wallow in mundane building blocks like scales. Conway, however, knew how to motivate her impatient granddaughter.
While Genee sat at the piano, Conway would place a quarter on the top of each of her young protege’s hands. If Genee played an entire piece without the quarters sliding off her hands, she could keep the coins.
“I bought candy with them,” Genee says. “For the rest of my life, every teacher I ever had said I had the most impeccable form.”
Genee didn’t pick up the guitar until she was about 14 years old. Both her older brothers played, while her father was an impressive cellist and bassist.
Only slightly more diminutive then, Genee quickly grew frustrated because her small hands made it difficult for her to play bar chords. Fortunately, her brothers were also wrestlers and their mentoring was not unlike the rough-and-tumble coaching to which they were accustomed.
Brother Jeff told her: “Being a girl is not an excuse.”
So Genee, like she would many times in the next decade, buckled down. She played a song entirely comprised of bar chords until her “hands fell off.”
Now, bar chords are plentiful in Genee’s repertoire.
“It’s a huge part of the fabric of the way I write and express rhythms,” she says.
Singing didn’t come naturally for Genee. She knew herself well enough to take classical vocal lessons for several months in the past year, learning to sculpt her voice in a disciplined manner similar to how she trained on instruments.
Now, Genee’s singing acumen is arguably the most distinguished element of her performances. Her vocal dynamics take listeners on a guided tour of her personal peaks and valleys that are not unlike those of Colorado, where she moved in July.
Genee’s admitted selfishness in composing music has always been overridden by a genuine compulsion to return the gifts she has received from countless other artists who have bowled her over, picked her up and inspired her.
“It’s so easy to self-destruct,” she says. “Music can help you take your emotions and turn them around rather than using substances or developing habits that continue your downward spiral.”
In a move that reinforced her independent nature, Genee decided to check out a local open mic night on her own early in 2006. She had no friends in tow, no safety net on which she could securely fall.
“For some reason, I felt compelled to do it alone, because it was for me,” she says.
Genee walked into the bar with a textbook from school and her guitar. She sat down, listened to other performers and studied for an exam she had the following day.
Then she got it out of her system.
“I feel if I don’t share it I’m going to explode,” she says. “Are they feeling what I’m trying to get across? When I see their faces and they are it makes me feel incredible.”
Genee graduated from East Stroudsburg in December, 2006, with a B.S. in Psychology. She is now working as a Research Assistant at the University of Colorado and breaking into the Denver music scene.
Currently, she faces the frustration of being torn between her two greatest desires: going to graduate school for epidemiology and biostatistics, and pursuing her music career.
“I’m convinced its possible to balance both. But I realize I may need to postpone one while pursuing the other, and thats ok with me.”
Wherever she decides, a complete arsenal of musicianship and songwriting will accompany her. So will an inherent need to learn, create and perform.
“Through all my difficulties music is the one thing that can make me feel alive,” she says. " I can breathe again after life takes your breath."
