Brick Red Room
Lago Di Garda Italia
January 2014

We are so excited, pleased and proud to announce the early spring 2014 release of our second album, “Identity”. Sign up on our mailing list, so you’ll be the first to be notified as to the exact date or to pre-order your copy. This CD has been a bit of a long and rather intense birth, but a happy one and each song deals in some way with the issue of what defines one’s identity. The idea came to me as I was struggling with the question in my own life. Being adopted as a young girl and then as a young adult having lived in many countries around the world, I asked myself if never knowing who my blood relatives are, or indeed a thing about them, meant that I could never really know who I was.

The question put to me so often around the world, but especially here in Italia is “Yeah you’re American, but where are you from?” or “Where are your roots?? or, “Who are your people?” and of course at the doctors office, “What’s your family medical history ?” Could it be true, as I so blithely answered each time, that I am a citizen of the world? I started thinking “what is it that defines me?” What has shaped me into me? I am an African American woman, a singer/songwriter, a survivor of child abuse, and a world traveler. How much has any of that or the man I chose as my partner, and the lovers who came before him shaped my identity?

The endless list of musicians, authors and artists whose work has buoyed, comforted, thrilled and consoled me.. what percent their contribution? Would I be more grounded if I could trace my ancestry, if I could map the path of my DNA?

The songs on this album reflect this search- not only my own, but also those of countless people I’ve met from all walks of life who have the same question, as well as people I’ve seen on the news, my fellow band members, my brother (I never refer to him as my adoptive brother, he could not be more my brother if he were my blood, I find it so galling when people ask about my “real” family, how can our relationship be so discounted merely because we were not carried in the same womb?)

The oxford dictionary defines identity as being “the characteristics determining who or what a person or thing is” and defines characteristic as “a feature or quality belonging typically to a person, place, or thing and serving to identify them.” Hmmmmm, well I hope that you will join the band on this journey, this exploration into what makes us all us…and please let us know your own thoughts and impressions as regards this question. All that said, I promise a good time with this album, which is true to ourselves, our musical Hippie Tendencies style, and which strives to be socially aware of our place in the universe. Come be a part of our identity…

Lisa

“He allowed himself to be swayed by his conviction that human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but that life obliges them over and over again to give birth to themselves.”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez, Love in the Time of Cholera

Painting on silk by Laura Giardina- for more about her work follow the links below.

http://tinyurl.com/ne2sexr   http://tinyurl.com/ntt9b7w   http://tinyurl.com/p9d63pr

Sources

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/identity

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/characteristic?q=characteristic

There are many interesting blogs out there with more to say on the subject, check

http://kaurthoughts.wordpress.com/2013/09/10/a-kaur-identity-crisis/

http://aphilosopherstake.com/2012/09/26/personal-identity-who-are-you-what-am-i/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/16/tibetan-art_n_3762140.html

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