Lisa Crawley is the latest guest on Making Music, Making Ends Meet, a series focused on Australian and New Zealand musicians during the cost-of-living crisis.
For almost two decades, Crawley has been one of the hardest-working musicians in the country, and she’s been rewarded for her dedication by getting to travel the world playing music.
Her extensive music career has taken her to Japan, England, Australia, the US, and far beyond. It hasn’t been without its sacrifices, though.
“I’ve moved countries, lived with a lot of uncertainty, missed family events, and invested money back into music instead of more traditional milestones like buying a house,” Crawley told us.
“I’ve spent countless unpaid hours writing, recording, promoting, organising tours, and learning what feels like an endless number of songs. I don’t really see them as regrets — they’ve been conscious choices — but there have definitely been sacrifices along the way.”
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As Crawley doesn’t mind admitting, nobody chooses to pursue independent music “because it’s the easiest career.”
“You do it because every now and then a song connects with someone you’ve never met, and that still makes all the uncertainty worthwhile,” she explained.
Thanks to spending time living in Japan, London, Melbourne, and now Los Angeles, Crawley has built up a dedicated and diverse fanbase spread across the world.
“That’s been one of the joys of releasing music independently — you can build a community in places you’ve never even visited,” she said.
“I went back to London 15 years after living there to play a show and, to my surprise, had a decent audience who’d continued to follow my music over the years. When I was 19 I performed at a hotel in a remote town in Japan, and nine years later I booked a show in Tokyo where someone who remembered me from playing in Tim Finn’s band turned up with flowers.”
Throughout all her travels, the one constant has been, well, inconsistency: Crawley has committed herself to all manner of jobs to fund her art, from playing Mandy Moore’s piano hand double on This Is Us to hosting a weekly piano karaoke night in Melbourne.
When we spoke with her, she was flying to Minnesota to perform as Christine McVie in a Fleetwood Mac tribute band. “Many of the towns we visit aren’t places I’d otherwise end up, so it’s become an unexpectedly wonderful way to see parts of America that are very different from Los Angeles,” she revealed.
Read her full feature here.
