Lizzie West

Lizzie West writes and performs songs while embodying a restless, nomadic quality that pairs Neko Case’s emotional intensity with the blunt wit of Lucinda Williams and Kristin Hersh. Born in Brooklyn in 1973, she roamed widely across North America throughout her childhood and adolescence. The poetry of Jack Kerouac, Walt Whitman, and Ralph Waldo Emerson shaped her outlook, and Leonard Cohen stirred her imagination, so putting words on paper became second nature. Verse and prose served as her lasting refuge and truest dwelling. At eighteen she moved to London in pursuit of a sense of place. Four years afterward she reached Nashville, bought an acoustic guitar at a local pawn shop, and launched an independent campaign to create music. Restlessness soon drew her back to New York City, where she began playing at her sister’s bar, the Stinger, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. HBO placed two of her pieces, “Dusty Turnaround” and “Sometime,” in a film. She used the payment to record the original pressing of Holy Road: Freedom Songs, fashioning every disc sleeve by hand and selling the copies at performances. Several months later the song “Holy Road” appeared in a Spike Lee commercial, which supplied funds to manufacture another thousand copies of the album and to mount a tour across the country in 2000. While traveling she met her longtime hero Leonard Cohen and formed a singular connection. Sensing the need for greater stability, she returned to Manhattan and sang regularly in the city’s subways. Warner Bros. noticed the airy quality of her voice and signed her. A self-titled EP appeared in November 2002; Holy Road: Freedom Songs was then expanded with several new tracks and issued on a major label in April 2003. Three years afterward she released I Pledge Allegiance to Myself, her first album for Appleseed Recordings.