<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"   Photo: Fat Possum  Although her whiskey-soaked voice and folk-tinged rock songs stand up on their own, singer-songwriter Lissie Maurus (who goes by her first name) has certainly gotten a boost from famous fans\u2014Lenny Kravitz invited her to open for him before she even released a full-length album, Katy Perry extolled her Twitter followers to check her out, and David Lynch was spotted in the audience of one of her live shows. So it only makes sense that she would pay it forward the only way she knows how: with music. The Illinois-born, California-based musician just released Covered Up With Flowers, an EP of covers ranging from Kid Cudi&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Pursuit of Happiness&amp;quot; to Lady Gaga&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Bad Romance&amp;quot; to Metallica&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;Nothing Else Matters.&amp;quot; In between working on her sophomore album and preparing a Thanksgiving feast, Lissie let ELLE in on the secret to finding the perfect song to cover. ELLE: Your debut album, Catching A Tiger, came out over a year ago. Why follow it up with a bunch of covers?Lissie: The covers kind of just happened. I heard &amp;quot;Pursuit of Happiness&amp;quot; in the car with my friend, decided I wanted to play it, and then it was videotaped when I played it, posted online, and it became its own thing that I could have never predicted. People heard of me from a friend posting a cover on Facebook, so I thought it would be nice to put [the EP] out for them to have it and play it\u2014we get a lot of requests for the audio files. It happened really quickly and naturally. We put it together and dug it and said, `Hopefully people like this.&amp;#039; ELLE: Which is more difficult: Coming up with an interpretation of a well-known song like &amp;quot;Bad Romance&amp;quot; or writing your own?Lissie: I could probably cover a million things and make them my own, because you have relationships with songs. Writing my own material, that&amp;#039;s much more challenging. I&amp;#039;m a long-winded talker, it takes me a while to get to my point, [but] in a song you have three minutes to express a fully formed idea. So there&amp;#039;s a challenge to that. That can mess up your head sometimes.   Photo: Valerie Phillips  ELLE: How did you choose which songs to cover? Lissie: Recently I have this instinct that I can make this song my own, or I like this song but I don&amp;#039;t want to cover it. There&amp;#039;s never, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t want to do that song because it&amp;#039;s too classic.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s good to cover a song and not be too familiar with the original\u2014songs I just happen upon, or I hear in a grocery store, or over the loudspeakers at an airport. [I also like songs with] a message that I feel like in this moment in my life, `I want to say that.&amp;#039; &amp;quot;Pursuit of Happiness&amp;quot; is a bit defiant and kind of tough, and I was feeling kind of defiant at the time. With &amp;quot;Bad Romance&amp;quot; I had gotten out of a relationship not too long before that song came out, and I thought I was a really interesting way to talk about an unhealthy relationship. ELLE: It seems like you&amp;#039;re quite the avid tweeter!Lissie: I think it&amp;#039;s kind of silly, but I do it all the time. I&amp;#039;m not great at reading and responding to things [on Twitter], but there are a few other female singers who I met on Twitter before I met them in person. Michelle Branch, who had written with someone I had written with, would tweet me, and then we started acting like we were friends over Twitter, and so then we finally met. She&amp;#039;s a cool girl. ELLE: Does having famous fans like Michelle Branch or David Lynch open up doors for you, or is it just a nice ego boost?Lissie: I don&amp;#039;t quite know...I definitely think for myself and my band, it made us feel really good about ourselves. It&amp;#039;s really encouraging because [Lynch is] somebody who is really intelligent and creative. For someone like that to give us a seal of approval is pretty good; it gives us credibility\u2014people write us off as blonde chick who just sings and plays guitar. Getting to meet him was a total treat, it makes you feel like you&amp;#039;re on the right path, but does it sell more records? I have no idea. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a7852/lissie-takes-on-lady-gaga-33253/>