Lizzie West: she found her voice on a subway platform—next stop, record deal

You never know what's going to set off something revolutionary inside of you. For Lizzie West, it was a chance encounter with a black guitar while browsing through a crowded pawnshop in Nashville. It was a pivotal moment for the then--Elizabeth Westergaard--who until that point had been an actress, poet, and playwright. "When I found that guitar, the writing just poured through me in song," she says.

The resulting Holy Road ... Freedom Songs (Warner Bros.) is one of the most unusual records coming out this spring. "It's truth, it's love, it's religion, it's not religion, it's looking at anger and letting go--it's everything," says the 29-year-old of her debut. Thematically, the earnest folk-pop songs call to mind the Indigo Girls' search to be "closer to fine," and in her vocal cadences and self-seriousness you'll hear more than a hint of Natalie Merchant. But for West, the Holy Grail of poetic music is the canon of Leonard Cohen. Which is why she embarked on a cross-country pilgrimage to seek out Cohen--a trip she and a friend documented for a movie that will accompany the CD. "I needed to have that master-student kind of inspiration. Whitman had gone looking for Emerson, and Whitman was a big influence in writing Holy Road. He set out to write his own bible. I thought I should do the same," West explains, reaching for her "Holy Road suitcase," an old-fashioned leather bag at her feet. Inside is a handm ade journal--her "Holy Road Bible"--overstuffed with photos, doodlings, and stitched-yarn scenes of birds in flight, in between pages full of random thoughts and song lyrics.

Back from her journey, West now has a core following at the Stinger Club, the hipster hangout owned by her brother and sister in her hometown, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's not too far from her first stage, the Bedford Avenue L-train subway station, where she started out busking. "Something was coming through me, and I needed a platform for it," says West. "It turned out to be the everyman platform, with brilliant acoustics and packed with people."

Ray Rogers is a longtime Interview contributor.

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