Welcome to Twice 5 Miles Radio. I'm your host James Navé. This week I sit down with singer-songwriter Lisa Carver, who goes by her last name, in a conversation that moves from Music Row to a remote Alaskan commune and back again. Carver spent years chasing hit songs in Nashville, signed to Sony, before realizing the tailgates-and-Daisy-Dukes formula was quietly erasing the writer raised on gospel, Hank Williams, Tom Waits, and Leonard Cohen. She walked away.
Now, after a long hiatus, she's stepping back onstage, guitar in hand, ready to write from places she's always circled but never named, including a childhood spent in a religious cult that shaped her into the storyteller she is today. We talk about her ferocious story-songs, like "Whiskey and a Gun" and "Bullet," the guitar she lost to an airline and clawed back nine months later, and what she calls "the gift," that unteachable thing that lets a performer catch fire with an audience. It's a conversation about reclaiming a voice after years of writing for other people.