Lisa Moscatiello
Musical Multi-Tasking
by Tom Nelligan

Following a philosophy that life is more interesting when you try a little bit of everything, Lisa Moscatiello has developed into a powerful and multifaceted singer/guitarist. She comfortably ranges from Scottish ballads to smoky jazz, from Richard Thompson classics to baroque arrangements of Tom Waits barroom lullabies. Her rich, adaptable voice and ear for music fit any genre. "I have trouble focusing," she suggested with a laugh after an Albuquerque Folk Alliance showcase with Whirligig, one of the groups she sings with. But whatever the explanation, more than a dozen Washington Area Music Awards in assorted solo and band categories are a testament to how well she makes it all work.

Growing up in the 1970s in suburban Arlington, Virginia, Moscatiello found plenty of music around her. "I've been playing folk music ever since I was a kid," she said. "Both of my parents were avid music listeners. My father was into Frank Sinatra and Puccini. My mom was into that stuff, too, but she was the one who had the Peter, Paul & Mary records, and that's what really got me into folk music. My mom also introduced me to Joan Baez. I loved the early Baez stuff, when she just did the ballads.

"When I was about 14 I encountered Irish music. I heard Clannad on the radio, when they were still acoustic. I loved it. I thought I wouldn't like Irish music because I didn't know traditional Irish music; I had only heard the more commercial versions. So I went to their concert and got totally turned on. I knew that was what I wanted to learn. By chance, one of my neighbors, Wendy Morrison, was a really great Irish musician — I had heard her playing her tin whistle outside. She got me started, taught me how to back up tunes, and gave me tapes with great singers like Dolores Keane and Andy Stewart. She took me under her wing."

At the age of 15 — "before I knew how to drive," she admitted — Moscatiello sang with the D.C.-based Irish/American group Ceoltoiri, and she still performs on occasion with members of that long-lived band. In 1984 she went off to college at Yale University, where she joined a jazz-oriented a capella vocal group called Red Hot & Blue. "People in the group were fabulous musicians," she said, "and they introduced me to people like Sarah Vaughn and Thelonious Monk."

After college she moved back to the D.C. area, where, coincidentally, one of America's pioneering English-style folk-rock bands was looking to replace a departing singer. "I forced them to listen to me audition," she claimed with a smile, and so from 1989 to 1995 Moscatiello was the one of the two lead voices in the quintet called The New St. George. "I just loved the way it was a more pop-oriented approach to traditional music. I really liked Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, but I had never been in a group like that." NSG's sole CD, High Tea, showed exciting potential, but unfortunately the group fell apart in the wake of various difficulties soon after its release.

In 1995 Moscatiello recorded her solo debut, Innocent When You Dream, initially released on her own Happy Cactus label and reissued last year by Folk Era Records. It's a diverse collection of songs from sources that include Thompson, Waits, and the always prolific Trad., with arrangements running from traditional ballads to modern rock and jazz. She explained the predominantly dark theme of the material: "At that time in my life I was going through a lot of loss. The band broke up — that was a big awful deal — and I had one of those romantic bellyflops. I guess we've all done that! So a lot of the songs I picked enabled me to express that sense of loss." The mix of traditional with contemporary material seemed natural to her. "Judy Collins did that all the time on those old albums," she noted. "I wanted to have a lot of variety.

"There's a Scots ballad called 'Bogie's Bonnie Belle' that's a classic. It's a song about a guy who can't be with the woman he loves because he's of a different class than she is. While that may not be as big a factor nowadays, there's certainly romances that can't happen for various non-romantic reasons. That's a really great story. On the other end of the spectrum, I got to do a song by Lisa Bielawa, one of my Red Hot & Blue colleagues, that she wrote when we were in school. It's called 'If He Were You,' kind of a jazz cabaret thing, a little dissonant at times. It's one of my favorite songs on the album and one of my favorite songs to sing. It was nice to be able to do one by a friend."

The arrangements of the old songs have a very modern feel. "When you're a singer of traditional music that isn't from your country," Moscatiello explained, "you have to decide whether you're going to try to duplicate a really traditional sound or do something different. I'm taking the approach that in everything I do, I want to sound like an American singer. If I ever sing with an Irish accent or something it's totally by accident, because I learned it from Dolores Keane or someone.

"I would never record a song without singing it for an audience first. If no one reacts after I've been doing it awhile, I figure it needs some work. A song has to survive on its lyrics and music, period, apart from the personality or history or politics of the songwriter. As an interpreter of other peoples' songs, I think the meeting of minds between singer and songwriter is one of the more exciting aspects of the act of singing. It's a chemistry, even if both people aren't there at the same time. Sometimes there are sparks!"

Aside from her frequent solo shows, Moscatiello is the vocalist in the seven-person New York-based Celtic/fusion group Whirligig, where her songs intersperse the band's varied instrumentals. "I liked their approach to Irish music," she said, "and the attention to the arrangements. It was musically ambitious." And she does a lot more: "I sing with Grace Griffith and Chris Noyes, who are two wonderful singers from Maryland, and I play in a real traditional Irish band that exists pretty much to play in one place in Baltimore called J. Patrick's. That's when I get to play a lot of rhythm guitar, because I really enjoy backing Irish tunes.

"I have a couple different configurations by myself. I have kind of a rock and roll backup band with David Chappell [electric guitar] and Rico Petruccelli [bass], and I have a quieter concert band with Sue Richards on Celtic harp and Fred Leider on cello. It's good that I have attention deficit disorder because I can recycle the songs. And then there's Arthur Loves Plastic, a techno project that I do vocals for. It got a very bad review in Dirty Linen a couple months ago!" she cheerfully noted.

Meanwhile, two more recordings from this very busy performer are in the works. Whirligig's second CD, the first with Moscatiello, is due out this summer, and she has a second solo album coming later this year. The latter project has a specific deadline. "I'd like it to be out before the millennium, because I'm an alarmist," she laughed. "Maybe we can do a version on 8-track in case CDs won't work!"