Wendy & Lisa

Following the 1986 dissolution of the Revolution by Prince, childhood friends Wendy Melvoin, a guitarist, and keyboardist Lisa Coleman launched a fresh collaborative effort. Raised side by side in Los Angeles, the pair benefited early on from fathers who worked as session musicians and nurtured their musical growth. Coleman had entered the Revolution in 1979 during the Dirty Mind era, while Melvoin came aboard in 1984; beyond their playing, both contributed to Prince’s arrangements. On their debut album, issued under their own names, Wendy and Lisa handled nearly every instrument and wrote the bulk of the songs alongside former Revolution drummer Bobby Z. After supporting Joni Mitchell on the 1988 release Chalk Mark in a Rainstorm, the pair welcomed Melvoin’s twin sister Susannah into the fold and cut Fruit at the Bottom, a sequence of tracks tracing romantic highs and lows. Additional relatives later participated in the stylistically eclectic Eroica, an album that blended the duo’s wide-ranging tastes in funk, jazz, dance, pop, and rock, with k.d. lang adding vocals. That project appeared in 1990, after which the two maintained a lower profile through much of the decade before resurfacing in 1998 under the name Girl Bros.