Lissie: "I was feeling very trapped in my life"

She has received airplay from Radio 2 and contributed vocals to songs by Robbie Williams and Snow Patrol. A live album – Live at Union Chapel – is out today. Lissie spoke to EDWIN GILSON about her farm, touring with Lenny Kravitz and the anxiety of criticism.

Hi Lissie. How are you?

Good! I’m going to the dentist soon. I smoke and I drink and I don’t have the best lifestyle, so I get my teeth cleaned every three months so I can pretend that I do.

My Wild West is about your move from California to the mid-West. Was this an obvious theme to write about?

Well no, actually. I feel like the songs subconsciously predicted the move. I wasn’t planning on moving when I was starting to write, I was just trying to write to get another record deal or make some kind of systematic plunge into something.

It’s almost like my self-conscious was starting to push me in the direction of going back to the mid-West. I’ve never been so great at having a big theatrical grand plan or vision. I don’t know what’s going to happen, I’m just going to live my life and write about it.

Did you think you needed more physical and mental space than Los Angeles offered?

I think there are different ways of living so I wanted a balance between LA’s experience and excitement and the more rural life. The time I spent in LA gave me a lot of good material but I wouldn’t put myself through that again because it was gut-wrenching. I think having more physical space and less stimulus is good. It’s nice not to have a million billboards trying to sell you things every day. I didn’t realise it when I was living there but it’s got to have some kind of psychological impact you don’t even realise. I needed solitude.

You live on a large farm in Iowa now. Isn’t that quite disorientating?

Yeah, I bought 47 acres of land. In California, after LA, I was still living a quite rural life in a place called Ojai. That was in the middle of the two extremes. A year and a half ago I moved back to the mid-West, where I grew up. I transitioned between urban and rural by living in Ojai for seven years.

What do you plan to do with 47 acres?

I don’t really have any plans to do farming. My aim with most of the land is to put it into conservancy. I want bees and chickens and things like that. Donkeys maybe. I don’t think I’ll ever have acre upon acre of corn.

Lines like “I want to feel my life” on the new album seem to imply a desire for a more authentic experience. Was this a desire for you when writing My Wild West?

I know that I had this yearning in my heart and soul for something beyond what I was feeling. I still have it. We all do. We all try and fill a void in our hearts. I actually wrote that line quite early in the making of the record. I felt I was very trapped in my own life and that if I made nature and the outdoors part of my being I could get around that problem. I realised I didn’t have to feel like I was stuck in some game – I learned I had to survive and thrive on my own terms.

Can you identify what made you feel this entrapment, exactly?

I was not having fun any more and I felt a lot of pressure. You put your songs up for debate and then you start to imagine people not liking them and then not recording any more because people don’t like them. That isn’t even true. I appreciate constructive criticism but if I write a song I believe in I don’t want anybody telling me it’s not good.

That’s messed up and not nice. It was giving me a lot of anxiety. That was the turning point. I don’t care any more. I’ve realised I’m not going to be on the world stage, probably, so now I want to let that go and exist in a way that feels right for me. I’ll still make a living and we can all get on with our lives.

Lenny Kravitz asked you to join his tour – do you count that as a catalyst for your career?

I don’t know that it was a turning point in my career as such but it was a very good experience. It was great to see what the touring life was like. Even with somebody as big as Lenny Kravitz, it wasn’t like everybody was partying like in the movies.

Everyone was working hard and it’s go, go, go. Experiencing that solidified my notion that music was what I wanted to do. I didn’t have a whole lot of interaction with Lenny Kravitz. That tour was a bit of a standalone thing for me – it was a great thing to do but it wasn’t part of any overarching project for me.

When did you first know you wanted to make a career of music?

From a very young age. The other day I heard a comedian on the radio talking about how even if he’d had one gig a month he’d think he was doing really great. Everyone around him was probably thinking he wasn’t doing all that well but in is head he was.

In his head he had already made it. Even in college and starting playing open mics, I knew I wasn’t doing that well on the surface but I kept trying and trying. Still, to this day, things happen every now and then which make you think “maybe I am on the right track, maybe I’m not completely delusional”.

It must take a lot of self-confidence in those early days to act on your ambitions in music.

Even with the successes I’ve had and being on a label there have been times where people wanted me to be something I wasn’t. They thought they were helping me. I am what I am, for better or worse. I could probably learn how to be a little more mysterious which might help my career or whatever.

You can’t give up what you know is right for you, though. I could have failed miserably and been the biggest loser ever but I’d still tell myself I was doing great. You have to give yourself little pep talks. The failures will make whatever success you have all the sweeter.

Lissie, Concorde 2, Madeira Drive, Brighton, Wednesday, December 7, 7.30pm, £20, 01273 673311