Fast-talking city-slicking guitar-slinging firecracker making Americana music.
Standing a tiny five feet tall, fast-talking and well-travelled, Lisa De Angelis blends traditional folk music with her own modern Americana grit. Her confessional style of songwriting and warm, smoky vocal weave stories of heartbreak, redemption and desire between verbal storytelling and candid onstage banter.
De Angelis’ road from punk band front woman into Americana troubadour was paved after fleeing a failed romance in North America that ultimately spanned several years, three continents and culminated in her sleeping on a train station bench in Belgium; ABC Radio’s Lindsay ‘The Doctor’ McDougall described De Angelis’ unlikely journey into the genre as “a musical mission from Macarthur to Arkansas and back again”. De Angelis’ lyrics and live show use this unlikely set of experiences – combined with her thumbtack knack for comedic timing and distinctive finger-picked guitar style – to create surprisingly relatable contemporary cowboy music for city audiences.
Scrappy, vulnerable and heartfelt, ‘part Judy Garland, part Saturday Night Live comedian’ onstage, De Angelis hails from Sydney’s southwest and cut her musical teeth in the deep south of the United States.
As of September 2019, De Angelis has only been playing guitar, self-taught, for two years. In January she graduated from Country Music of Australia’s prestigious ‘Academy of Country Music’ in Tamworth, being mentored by industry heavyweight Kevin Bennett (Kevin Bennett and the Flood / Bennett, Bowtell and Urquhart) and flourishing under the tutelage of Lyn Bowtell and Roger Corbett (The Bushwackers). Her graduation from The Academy preceded her first year performing at the Tamworth Country Music Festival, and she was invited by the Academy to showcase at the 2019 Gympie Music Muster shortly after.
Following her TCMF debut, De Angelis was invited to open for Americana sweethearts Catherine Britt, Melody Moko and Natalie Henry on their ‘Woman Enough’ tour, and soon after was announced as the main support for the Sydney leg of Grinspoon frontman Phil Jamieson’s winter tour. Having carried her DIY punk sensibilities over into Americana, she released her no-frills self-recorded acoustic EP ‘The Prairie Fire Sessions’ in January, and that same month her crossover single ‘Hand-Me-Downs’ with Melbourne folk-punk musician Luke Seymoup went to number one on the Triple J Unearthed punk charts, racking up over 20,000 Spotify streams in its first four weeks. De Angelis supported Brisbane Golden Guitar nominee Hayley Marsten on her Spectacular Heartbreak tour through late 2019 and early 2020, and is currently working on her debut album.
