Castles On The Prairie
By Tom Lanham
T
here is a word – and indeed a whole
attendant concept – that singer-song-
writer Lissie (born Elisabeth Corrin
Morris in Rock Island, Illinois; she long
ago dropped her surname for performing)
had gradually let slip from her memory,
over her recent years spent living in sunny
Ojai, California. And it’s not something too
easy to forget – it’s winter. Particularly the
icy grip of a Midwestern winter, a beast
that simply cannot be appeased no matter
how much salt you throw down on slip-
pery streets or how much elbow-greased
shoveling you’re prepared to do just to
clear your walkway for the mailman. Not
to mention the extra 45 minutes you
should allow yourself at its coldest, just to
defrost and methodically scrape your car
windows to get to work each morning.
That frigidity stays with you, no matter
how far you run from your heartland
home, no matter how steamy and sauna-
sweltering your new state might turn out
to be.
But Lissie no longer remembered win-
ter’s significance, or it's potentially brood-
ing malevolence. Live in California long
enough, and snowstorms? They’re merely
an abstract construct from your past that
no longer has much to do with daily exis-
tence. The 25-year old singer was remind-
ed soon enough, however, when – in a
move that surprised pretty much everyone
around her – she impulsively bought a
working 47.7-acre farm in northeast Iowa,
where she ditched the meddling music
business and came up with what is
arguably her best work to date, the chim-
ing new Castles, her fourth. And one of the
first seasonal messages she got in 2015 as
the frost set in was, she will never survive
this without a pickup truck. Just getting up
her long driveway when it was below
freezing required every bit of four-wheel
drive horsepower she could muster. “So I
bought a 2007 Dodge Ram, and I call her
Pearl,” she admits, then sighs. “But she
doesn’t get very good gas mileage.”
The property has some intriguing fea-
tures included, with which its new owner
is only now becoming familiar, like its
fusillade of bustling apiaries which kick up
quite a thriving honey trade. “I don’t
directly keep the bees – there’s a guy from
town who helps me with things around the
place, and he takes the bee-box frames out
and shows me what they’re up to,” Lissie
explains of how everything works on the
new homestead. “And I rent all my tillable
land out to my neighbors because I’ve got
a lot of neighbors who all have gardens.”
So many in fact that there’s been a crop
surplus lately. “So right now, you can’t
even give your food away. I’ll have an
abundance of zucchini, and everyone’s
like, ‘No, sorry – we already have too
much zucchini ourselves!’ But I do try and
give away all my extra produce, so it’s
been a nice balance. I still tour a lot – that’s
how I make my living. But now when I am
home, I have a lot more now that I want to
do. And I feel like it’s a long-term process
because I’d eventually like to get some ani-
mals. I’ll start with some chickens and
work my way up to a horse – and right
now I’m canning. But do I really know the
best recipes for my canning? I’m trying to
be as self-sufficient as I can.”
Now, the artist is finding that her two
lifestyles are inextricably and symbiotical-
ly linked. In the past, Lissie says, she did-
n’t give a thought to her often exhausting
tour schedule – she merely piled into the
van and went where she was told to go. No
longer. Until recently, she had no idea that
she could design her own idiosyncratic
itinerary, in conjunction with her non-stage
needs. “So now I’m like, ‘I want to solo
tour this month and make X amount of
money.’ So I go out there, and I hustle, so I
can go home and take care of my garden.”
The decision to pull up stakes and