About Liz Lee

Merging blues, funk, soul, country and southern rock, Liz Lee refuses to rest in any one genre.

A singer since childhood, she didn’t begin writing her own music until after college. Inspired by Sarah McLachlan and her female-fronted music festival Lilith Fair, Liz had a feeling that she could be a songwriter if she learned how to play an instrument, so she grabbed her father’s guitar and answered an ad for guitar lessons. “After my first lesson, I felt absolutely reborn,” she recalls. “I had songs backed up in my mind, and I had to get them out. I practiced for hours everyday just to get to the point where I had enough chords to start writing songs.”

Liz soon found that synchronicity supported her efforts. On her way home from a guitar lesson one evening, she stopped for coffee on the campus of her alma mater, Emory University. “I met a woman who had an extra ticket to see Alice Walker speak that night. She offered me the ticket, and of course I accepted. Before the talk, Doria Roberts, a local singer-songwriter, performed a set. Midway through a song, the strangest thing happened—we had a fire drill, of all things. We had to evacuate the building, and I ended up standing a few feet from her. I decided to strike up a conversation with her and ask her advice on how to get started writing songs. She may not remember this conversation, but she really motivated me. Alice Walker was inspiring, of course, but I knew that this conversation with Doria was really what I came for.”

After writing a few songs and fumbling through open mics and coffee house performances, she began to steadily develop her songwriting style and warm stage presence. “I realized that what was more important than nailing a performance was connecting with my audience,” she reveals. “Getting applause is great, but what really matters is having people tell me later that they were really touched by a song—that they could really relate to it.”

Friends started asking Liz when she was going to start recording, so in the summer of 2002, she created a four-song demo with producer/singer/songwriter Mic Levine, setting the stage for her collaboration with some of Atlanta’s most talented musicians and songwriters. It was through Levine that she met Michael Wynne, who would eventually produce “The Road That Leads to You.” In addition, she found herself working with such talented local artists such as Matthew Kahler, Number 99, and Chip Houston.

After releasing her demo, Liz took the next several years to refine her writing style and round out her repertoire. “I also found lots of great ways to distract myself from recording an album,” she admits. “I got a master’s degree, went to yoga teacher training, lived in Spain for two years, came back to Atlanta, and eventually had nothing left to do BUT record.”

Even after seven years of songwriting, producer Michael Wynne encouraged Liz to consider co-writing a few songs to add new energy to the record. These writing sessions resulted in the title track as well as two ballads, “Listen to Me” and “All There Is.”

Musically speaking, the songs on the album cover a broad range of styles, touching on everything from the pop-influenced “Not Dreaming” to the rootsy Tennessee mountains-inspired title track “The Road That Leads to You.” Liz carefully chose each of these songs for its contribution to the overall idea of the album. “For me,” she says, “what draws theses songs together—lyrically and thematically--is a journey from complication to simplicity. We make up all kinds of stories for why we can’t connect with another person, but it ultimately leads back to ourselves and our willingness to be open. These songs have been my way of working toward this realization.”

A few months after releasing her first album, Liz was asked to be an emergency fill-in artist on Dirty South TV's live weekly hit show for independent music, "Live Sessions From The Dirty South." There her music career took a fascinating turn as she met her future producer (and love of her life) Giuseppe Colato, CEO and President of Dirty South TV. G., as people call him, was completely taken in by her voice and soothing demeanor. The two hit it off immediately and have spent the last three years pursuing their dreams together. Liz, once a middle school English teacher, resigned her position in 2010 and committed herself fully to creative pursuits, touring with the Liz Lee Band in summer 2010 and creating Liz Lee Media (a business dedicated to web design and hosting, graphic design and videography) in January 2011.

During the time that Liz has been involved with G. and Dirty South TV, she has had the opportunity to sing with Atlanta greats such as Barry Richman, Charlie Wooton, Mike Martin, John McKnight, Bird Baillie and many others. She has also hosted two different shows on Dirty South TV, "The Stockbridge Sessions" and "Love on a Sunday," both featuring her own original music. "Love on a Sunday" returns in September 2011 in a weekly format and will feature new songs co-written with Nathan Morgan, Charlie Wooton, and other talented Southern songwriters.

Pre-production for her second album, "Passion Recovery," is underway. "Before committing to a final track list, I want to see what comes of these co-writing sessions," Liz explains. "When I successfully write a song on my own, I have a tremendous feeling of accomplishment, but Nathan and Charlie are two songwriters that I really look up to--Nathan for his high energy Southern Rock feel, and Charlie for his ability to dig so deeply into a groove. He challenges me to write from a place deeper than I would normally feel comfortable tapping into."

What can we expect from her sophomore album? "'Passion Recovery' is exactly that--the process of recovering my passion that I have been so afraid of my entire life--but also the periodical re-covering, or hiding it. I get to a place where I am feeling brave enough to let those powerful, sometimes darker emotions into my songwriting, and then I cover them up and avoid them for a while," Liz admits. The song that breathed air into the concept of this album, simply titled "The Passion Song," asks, "Where is my passion/ I had it a long time ago..." and answers, "It's been locked in a box wrapped in a ribbon of rage/ flapping its wings around this cage/ Somebody told my body not to move/ So many people telling me what I could not do/ And then one day those voices became me."

On the other end of the spectrum of this album, is "Love on a Sunday," which tells of a deep desire for a clear and pure love that is more than just a passing fling. "I actually wrote this song one week before meeting G." Liz explains, "The song was like a magical incantation that brought in the relationship I had been dreaming of for so many years."

One of the most recently written songs on this album, titled "There's a World Out There," came from a year spent in what Liz calls her "hibernation."

Time to get up off the sofa, time to walk outside your front door,

Baby there's a world out there.

Time to log off of your Facebook, just forget your status and take a look,

Baby there's a world out there.

"This song is a pep talk for myself," she confesses. "When confronted with transformative but unpleasant emotions like anger, sadness, fear and shame, my first instinct is to avoid other people, because they mirror the things I need to change about myself. I realized after a year of doing this that rejecting the outside world is a form of rejecting myself." Self-love and self-acceptance are themes that weave themselves throughout the songs on "Passion Recovery," and Liz makes it very clear that although she has not reached her destination, she wants her journey to inspire others who may have struggled with these issues. "I feel like the root of so much conflict in the world begins with low self-esteem projected outward. I see this in myself and in others, and at the end of the day all I can do is work on myself and hopefully inspire others to do the same."

Whether it's lyrical honesty or the broad range of genres touched upon in this album that draws you in, this latest creation by Liz Lee will keep you listening, track after track. "Every song will be someone's favorite. That's just how Liz writes. No song is inferior to any other song. They are all equally powerful from start to finish," producer Giuseppe Colato asserts. "And after the last few years of singing with some of the best musicians in the world, you'd better believe that Liz will unleash every last bit of her passion into this album."