Last year Liz Stringer toured for ten months her fifth album, 'All The Bridges'.
But it hasn’t been without a few hiccups. “Last year when I came back from Canada, I’d been overseas for about two months, I came back and my car had been stolen a couple of nights before I got back,” Liz says.
“My housemate called me when I was on my way to the gate in Sydney airport to go back to Melbourne. I’d been in Sydney and hadn’t been home yet and she called me and said ‘Oh the police found your car and it was on fire’… So they nicked it and then they burnt it.”
Believe it or not, that’s the second time she’s come home from tour and had a car stolen. Liz has been living on and off on the east coast of Canada the past 12 months, but is predominantly based in Melbourne.
“I performed over there in their winter this time, which was pretty hardcore… A lot of touring musicians go there because it’s a really good scene and it’s fairly similar to what Australia is like in the way that it’s structured.
“But I guess it’s a slightly bigger market and it’s a really beautiful country and really convenient as far as restrictions and stuff, there’s a lot of musicians and artists that go there,” Liz says.
Raised in a musical family, music has always come naturally to Liz. Her father is a retired music teacher, her sister is a music teacher and her brother is also a musician. But she says that despite always being surrounded by music, she never intended to make music a career.
“I certainly wasn’t planning on doing that when I was a kid. I just ended up doing it more than I did anything else… I kind of went through a few phases, but I assumed I was going to do something with teaching or lecturing,” Liz says.
“I think I wanted to teach, that’s what I thought I’d end up doing… I speak German and studied an undergraduate study in Germany. I think that’s what I’d be doing now if I wasn’t performing full time.”
Liz did attempt to write some music in German, but says she never really succeeded. She lived over there when she was 19 and enjoyed the eclectic taste and open mindedness that the European music scene had to offer.
Liz has been busy with music of late, but surprisingly enough not always her own. It was a four-year break that sparked her desires to bring herself back with her latest solo album, 'All The Bridges'. “That album is interesting because leading up to that I’d been doing a lot of other projects, playing in other people's bands.
“I had a collaboration with a few artists and recorded and toured with that and I did a lot of session work and lots of other stuff and I hadn’t released an album of my own, original material for about four years,” Liz says.
“I really needed to get back into the ring basically… I got as many songs together that I thought were good enough and went in to record the album just to get myself back in the swing of where I needed to be. It’s really done that job for me. I’m totally back on the horse now.”
– written by Emily Oswin
