Lissie returns to her Midwest roots after 'Wild West'

A little over a year ago, Lissie finally heard the Upper Midwest calling her back home after 12 years of pursuing her dreams in California. Unfortunately, she had to go to the hospital and put her music career on the skids before she heeded the call.

"I felt like I was having a heart attack and went in saying, 'I think something is very wrong,' " the soulful 33-year-old rocker recalled. The hospital instead diagnosed a classic case of anxiety.

"In my mind, I thought I was staying on top of everything, but that was my wake-up call to find a way to make myself happier and find a way to get more freedom. Not being free is the worst feeling for me."

Known from the 2010 hit "When I'm Alone," Lissie is going it alone on her latest tour, which rolls into the Pantages Theatre on Saturday. She's traveling solo in a rented car and using members of her opening band Skrizzly Adams for backers on stage. She also issued her new album, "My Wild West," on her own imprint after two prior efforts with sizable record-label support.

The singer born Elisabeth Maurus — a native of Rock Island, Ill. — is also living a more solitary life off the road these days.

Last summer, she bought a 10-acre farm in rural northeast Iowa. It's a couple of hours up the Mississippi River from her hometown and a few hours downriver from Minneapolis, which she already counts as one of her best markets.

"When I left at 18, you'd have never been able to convince me I'd move back to the Midwest," Lissie said by phone from a tour stop in Dallas earlier this month. "I'd have told you that you were crazy."

"I missed the seasons. I missed the lightning and thunder, and just the way the air smells in the summer when everything is green. I might get a little bummed in winter, but I think it's good for you to go through those sort of psychological cycles and have those months where you just stay in."

The decision to bid California adieu inspired many of the songs on "My Wild West," which she recorded during her final months there.

Tunes with literal geographic titles such as "Ojai" and "Hollywood" show both a fondness for the Golden State and a tiredness of its darker side. "I fell in love with California," she sings in the latter tune. "I fell in love with a dream / No matter how they try and warn you / You fall apart at the seams."

Other tracks are based more on Lissie uprooting her career and focusing on her personal well-being, including two singles, "Don't You Give Up on Me" and the more haunting "Hero." She sells the wound-licking vibe of each song with her husky, Stevie Nicks-like voice and the occasional full-throated release.

"Hero," she said, is based on "being comfortable with uncertainty and having a little more ambivalence in my life." Speaking more generally, she added, "My first album came after a really painful breakup, and the second was written with the distance on that pain. This third one is more me figuring out how to get right with myself."

"It was fun to do that at the time, that full Hollywood experience of going out most nights and winding up at weird parties where famous people would show up," she excitedly recounted. "I knew it wasn't something I wanted to do long-term, but it was interesting for that period of time."

That's quite a contrast to her current home life, where the wild nightlife belongs more to raccoons and owls. Lissie wants to keep her farm's locale private, of course, but she offered a pretty good description when she said the hardest part about fitting in could be "the fact that I'm Swedish Lutheran instead of Norwegian Lutheran."

The other difficulty was the move, she added: "I don't like driving in the snow. I'm the wimpiest about it and start crying."

Over the next couple of years, she plans to use a grant from the Conservation Reserve Program to convert her farm to a haven for wildflowers and other plants that draw bees and birds. She'll be tilling the land for musical purposes, too, and mentioned a desire to work with Iowa-bred folk bloomers the Pines and continue writing and recording her own music there.

"Ever since I decided to drop out of the music business, I've been busier than ever," she quipped.

Chris Riemenschneider • 612-673-4658

@ChrisRstrib