Arts & Entertainment
The Junior League Band with special guests, John Craigie & Leigh Jones - Live at Eddie's Attic!
Doors open at 6:30 pm. Tickets will be $15 at the door.
Why would an Atlanta singer with a Southern accent and a bluegrass-music-loving dad end up in Washington, D.C.? To get a master's degree in physiology and biophysics from Georgetown, of course.
Lissy Rosemont, 27, frontwoman of Junior League Band, her life has been shaped, it seems, by contrasting worlds: father (think Walter in "The Big Lebowksi," only mix in the South and some bluegrass) and a hymn-singing, angelic, peaceful mother from an influential Southern family. That, perhaps, gives you an idea of the type of person who would pursue a career as a doctor, only to turn it aside for the life of a struggling musician. "It was more shocking to my siblings and boyfriend, who was a musician and wanted to be a lawyer," Rosemont says, recalling her decision. She quit her job at the National Institutes of Health, where she was doing breast cancer research, and turned down two medical schools. All to follow the music.
The music on Junior League Band's third album, "Mitchell Williams Fo Govena," features fiddle, a banjo and a dobro. But it's not bluegrass. It's more down-home folk, the kind of music you picture friends playing on someone's back porch in Faulkner's South. And it's Rosemont, with her thin, simple and sweet but cutting voice, who really makes the sound. "I like to analyze a lot of things, anyway, whether it be people-watching or song structure," she says. Her approach to writing music seems methodical, if not downright scientific. She keeps a folder of words and phrases she likes. She looks at elements in other songs that work. She organizes her ideas and pieces them together. She has even studied one of her main influences, Pearl Jam, by watching them and reading interviews with them.
She says she doesn't regret the life as a doctor that she could have had, although she does miss the benefits of a stable job. But Junior League Band has been too busy to allow her any time to look back. Her life journey has lead her to a unique spot for a woman: leader of a band. "That, in terms of social activism, is a newer form of feminism," she says. She's really not trying to make any statement or be some sort of role model through her story or her music. That would be too pompous, she says. "I'm just trying to express myself." Nothing scientific about that.
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