We recently connected with Lisa Strod and have shared our conversation below.

Lisa, appreciate you joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

I learned to play guitar from YouTube tutorials mostly, I never had a formal teacher or training. It’s both a blessing and a curse, because I do feel a sense of freedom to do whatever sounds good, regardless if it’s theoretically sound or not. The downside to that is having certain limitations in technique and songwriting, but punk rock was literally founded by teens picking up guitars in their bedrooms and completely throwing caution to the wind, so I definitely feel like I’m continuing that ethos in a way. I listen to records and just try to recreate whatever I’m hearing- singing the line over and over until I have the right notes. The most essential skill in learning any instrument in my opinion is having a strong perseverance and acceptance of not being good at first, messing up a million times and just pushing forward. But I can’t say I’ve ever straight up wanted to quit, because I just love it way too much.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.

I’m a guitarist and songwriter based out of South Florida, with musical roots in folk, rock, alternative, and a whole lot more! My good friend Leah Simmons has been a collaborator a mentor to me for about 3 years now and we’ve been playing live together around South Florida. The project I’m most proud of was definitely our song “The Lottery” because I genuinely had so much fun writing and recording it. We have other songs written and are working on recording and releasing them, so stay tuned for those!

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

I think capitalism has oriented society to thrive on transactional relationships, consumerism, and competition, none of which I’ve ever really been a fan of. While a healthy level of all those things is needed I suppose, in a progress driven world, art is usually the first thing to be thrown out. And I just think that’s wrong, and so many people are living counterintuitively to their creative expression to simply survive nowadays, to have that feeling of a safety net in this increasingly unpredictable world. It’s really important to support local venues and artists to keep our amazing community going, even in difficult times.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

For me, music is just such a pure and powerful form of expression- it’s really a spiritual journey. I think a lot of creatives can agree that you don’t choose your craft, it sort of chooses you. And not expressing yourself through your art is actually painful on an energetic level. I’m a very emotional person at my core and music is just the best avenue to express those emotions, to channel a bit of the chaos that goes on in my mind. And as a huge lover of music in general, it’s like the light in the darkness of my life.

Image Credits
Matt Faciana, Erin Luna