Lissie Maurus is from here, this rounded part of the Land of Lincoln
that most people still believe to be another part of Chicago because
their mental map of Illinois ends at the suburbs, as that Aurora outlet
mall fades into the eastern distance. Rock Island, Ill., probably gave
her those carameled freckles that dot her cheeks. The blue collar town
that shares the Mighty Mississippi River as a border with Iowa
definitely fused into the young, natural blonde: her sass and her
inability to be phony, to be anything other than a talker, a good hug,
a warm and affectionate sweetie pie, a light-hearted sprite, a girl who
hits the municipal pool or the freshwater lake frequently when the
weather’s right, a girl who eats cheeseburgers, drinks when she’s happy
and is sort of a son of a gun in sundresses and with a smoke between
the fingers. Here is where the winters make you seek shelter for months
because there are near unbearable situations like wind chill factors of
50 degrees below zero and summertime often brings with it such a thick
humidity, fat with mosquitoes, that it melts people in half. It’s where
the U.S. government makes a ton of bullets and guns and it’s a place
that used to make way more farm implements that it does now. The floods
that come down the river in the spring are epic.

All of these details and more are Lissie and the songs that she writes, that she put on this debut EP, Why You Runnin’, on Fat Possum Records. Produced by friend Bill Reynolds, who just happens to be the bassist in Band of Horses, Lissie couldn’t be more
enchanting, or more of a person explaining the mystery of how she came
to be full of that muddy river water, which along with it come the
whiskered muskies, the bass and the bullheads that all swim through her
body like the dark clouds and the passing driftwood. The five songs are
stacked with the kind of billowing and rustic sentiments that come from
broken hearts that have been patched as well as they can be, gaining
that scar tissue that never makes them like new again, but gives them a
refined personality, one that’s subtle and powerful all in one fling.
Lissie has all kinds of love in her heart and it comes out in
resplendent and oaky waves, like the insides of a campfire doing a lot
of talking, a lot of jumping – leaving its smoke burrowing into your
skin and clothing, where it reclines for days.

There are all these things that make these songs and her spirit
possible, some of it in deference to that spirit: having a grandfather
who was an international barbershop quartet champion, having a
great-grandfather who was a train-jumping hobo on this famous Rock
Island Line (the Cash song of the same name Lissie has played in
hometown gigs), a father who delivered her at her birth, getting kicked
out of high school, selling honey for living money upon coming to LA
and an inability to separate herself from this Midwestern city where
many just raise their families, get fat and die satisfied.

She lives by herself, with her dog, in a farmhouse in Ojai, Calif.,
where she tends to drink wine and will, on a whim, go to the store to
buy paint for her rocks so she can construct a medicine wheel in her
big backyard. She has all the time to listen to what’s happening in her
inner chambers, what’s turning on and off her lights, what’s giving her
goosebumps and where she thinks she’ll be led tomorrow.

- Sean Moeller, Daytrotter