How a hike to a Canadian glacier brought Cool Moon’s Andrea Lisi back to the sur
New Year’s Eve, 2014: Andrea Lisi is driving in the Canadian Rockies with her sister Anna and their spouses. The destination is Columbia Icefield, just off Alberta Highway 93 in Jasper National Park. Timing is crucial—they want to reach the Athabasca Glacier while there’s still daylight—and it very much works out in their favor. When their car pulls off the Icefields Parkway, the frigid wind is low enough that Andrea and Anna comfortably make the 20-minute hike across the field and touch the glacier.
“Our husbands stayed in the car and watched,” Lisi laughs as she remembers that day. “But it was one of the most exciting things I’d ever done. It was one of those moments: ‘What if there’s an avalanche up here and we die?’ It’s so cold and isolated. But so beautiful.”
A photo snapped by her husband, Jay Littleton, appears on the wraparound cover of Postparty Depression (Exotic Fever), the debut LP from Lisi’s band Cool Moon. The feelings of that field, on that day, resonated with this set of songs—feelings of introversion, self-doubt and psychic isolation. But also the feeling of being totally OK with it all.
Cool Moon is Lisi’s second go as a musician. In the early aughts, she was the songwriter, guitarist and vocalist at the front of Washington, D.C. trio Del Cielo. Drawing equally on power pop and riot grrrl, that band released two albums before parting ways in early 2006 on the heels of their terrific Lovitt Records release Us Vs. Them. Lisi played briefly in Arlington, Va., band the Bickersons before going back to grad school at West Virginia University to pursue a master’s in geology, a project that pretty much took her out of the music game.
“I was working full time, going to school,” she recalls. “I would still write music, but I didn’t have a lot of spare time.”
She would see friends’ bands perform and realize how much she missed it. The song “Standing” on Postparty Depression details those feelings: “Every time it seems as good as done/I know the worst I’ve felt was the best I ever was.”
After graduating, Lisi moved to Houston to take a job as a clastic stratigrapher, deriving information about geological changes through close reading of sedimentary evidence. One of her first nights in town, she caught a gig by Football, Etc. and chatted up the band after the show; turns out frontwoman Mercy Harper was a big Del Cielo fan. The two hit it off and Harper helped Lisi back into music, playing in an early incarnation of Cool Moon, then connecting her with her current bandmates Anthony Schillaci (drums) and Marshall Graves (bass). The songs they write are big and bold, with crunchy guitars and soaring vocal melodies recalling Sugar-era Bob Mould as much as Mary Lou Lord.
Beneath the hooks, Lisi is lyrically candid about feelings of insecurity and helplessness, whether due to the toxic political climate (“Election”) or personal struggles with anxiety (“Solitary Confinement”). Which is why the ice field resonated so much with her.
“It’s just something I’ve always had—feeling the need to do really well and then feeling like I’m not doing things well enough,” says Lisi. “But also kind of knowing I’ll be all right. As I get older, I feel a little more isolated but also more comfortable.”
—John Vettese
