Lissie Maurus, cialis who rocks out under the single stage name Lissie, health hit the Royale on Tremont Street for one of their early Friday night gigs – doors at 6 pm, vialis 40mg opener at 7, headliner at 8 and everyone out the door by 9:45, so the Royale can transform itself back into a late-night discotheque.
Lissie had been in town back in June, playing the Brighton Music Hall, but the Royale’s more spacious stage provided a better showcase, allowing Lissie and her three-member band room to roam. And if you had any doubt who you had come to see, a huge backdrop at the rear of the stage spelled out the headliner’s name in lights.
Lissie’s second album, Back to Forever, was released in early September, and she featured a half dozen tracks from the new disc in a 17-song set. This album is more pop-oriented than her first release, 2010’s Catching a Tiger, which leaned closer to alt-country-rock. Regardless, when she plays live, any worry about genres goes by the wayside as Lissie’s guitar-playing comes to the fore, backed by more-than-able fellow guitarist Eric Sullivan, bassist Lewis Keller and multi-instrumentalist Jesse Siebenberg.
It took the Royale crowd a little while to get ramped up to full party-mode, perhaps a downside of the early start time. But Lissie – clad in black t-shirt, black jeans and black boots – wouldn’t let up, and by the time she launched into “When I’m Alone,” one of the best tracks on her first album, followed by a sultry version of the new song “They All Want You,” the crowd had found its voice.
Lissie has been taking care of her own voice for the last year or two, after suffering throat problems, and was drinking hot tea at the start of the show. “I have tequila too,” she said from the stage. “But this is tea. I have to pace myself.”
The show really hit stride when she switched over to tequila, and the band started to stretch out and jam on “Shameless,” the first single from the new album, and the awkwardly-titled “Further Away (Romance Police)” – the back story on the title being that the band wanted to call the song “Further Away” and Lissie wanted it to be “Romance Police,” so they compromised. Sandwiched between the two was an as-yet-unreleased song, “Shroud,” which Lissie said she wrote five years ago but had recently rediscovered.
She closed her regular set with a fiery version of “In Sleep,” before returning for a three-song encore. After “Oh Mississippi,” her ode to the mighty river (Lissie grew up in Rock Island, Illinois), she was planning to play a cover of a Drake song as the night’s final number. But when the audience began clamoring for her usual closer, her cover of Kid Cudi’s “Pursuit of Happiness,” she put the matter to a venue-wide voice vote. The result was unclear, so she relented and said she’d play both covers. Glad she did, because as much as I like her version of the Kid Cudi song (it was named one of Rolling Stone’s best cover songs of the last 10 years), it was the new Drake cover – “Hold On, We’re Going Home” – that was the killer tune of the night.
