One gets the feeling that there’s not much that Liz Lamere can’t do if she puts her mind to it.
A one-time drummer in a punk band as a teen, she graduated at the top of her class at Columbia Law School, spent years as a lawyer in prestigious law firms, co-wrote, co-produced, and performed music with her late husband Alan Vega, took up boxing at age 40, and is now learning how to play guitar at a time in her life when most people her age can’t be bothered to learn much of anything.
Not only that, but she’s working on her third solo album as well.
It all started in Milton, MA, where she remembers her dad playing music after dinner.
“We would listen to big band music, Tijuana Brass, Mozart,” she recalls. At around 15 years of age, her boyfriend introduced her to the Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and Patti Smith and it wasn’t long before they formed a band called BFI, which, unfortunately, stood for “Backwards Flying Indians.”
“He said, I’ll play guitar. And I said, well, I’ll play drums. How hard could that be?” she recounts.
Lamere says she went to Catholic school and “had 12 years with the nuns, which probably set me on my path of challenging rules and authority.”
“So I was a little bit of a rebel, but I was also a very good student, because I learned early on that getting good grades was valued in my household. So if I got good grades, I could do whatever I wanted to when I wasn’t at school,” Lamere recalls.
And, sometimes she got away with the things that she did at school.
“I was the official ear piercer,” she explains. “I would be the one with the needle and the ice, in the boys’ room, because it was an all-girls school, and the nuns didn’t look for us in there. I decided that I wanted to pierce my nose, and I did it. I put the stud in my nose, and when I came home, my mother was like, alright, that’s Liz being Liz! The nuns were horrified, but my parents didn’t even flinch.”
Jumping ahead a few years, Lamere made the decision to stay in New York to work as a lawyer, where she met her future husband Alan Vega, co-founder of the iconoclastic duo Suicide.
“I did get a job at an LA firm to do entertainment law, but I didn’t want to live in LA,” she recalls. “By then, I loved New York, I loved the diversity. It was gritty and it felt like it was real. And you could do anything you wanted to do – that whole idea of if you can imagine it, you can do it.”
While working for a major New York City law firm and moonlighting as a drummer in a band called Snub, a co-worker at the firm, who had heard that Lamere was the “punk drummer lawyer,” invited her to Vega’s record release party.
“We’re gonna pick up Alan Vega at the Gramercy Park Hotel, and then go to the Palladium for this party,” she says. Lamere notes that “I didn’t know him or who he was or anything, but I said, okay, that sounds like fun! And that was the night that we met, and we were pretty much together ever since.”
Decades of collaboration ensued, as Lamere became a musical partner to Vega, co-writing and performing on his albums as well as joining him on tour. Sadly, he passed away in 2016, but Lamere has kept the flame burning by not only releasing posthumous Vega LPs, but also co-writing his biography.
Even more importantly, though, Lamere began recording her own music. It started while Dante Vega, their adopted son, was living at home when COVID hit.
“He knew he wanted to be an audio engineer,” Lamere explains, “so he started his own recording studio in the living room, and he had all these hip-hop kids coming over. And I’m kind of jealous! I’m upstairs while he’s having sessions down there, and I’m hearing what they’re doing, and I’m thinking, geez, I should be making my own music.”
So, she continues, “I’ve got a captive engineer. I said, ‘Dante, we’re gonna make my album now.’ And he said, ‘Mom, it’s not my genre!’ I told him, ‘What is genre? Have you learned nothing from your dad and me? There is no genre.’ And I always was kind of influenced by more of a dancey, hip-hop thing. I love that. I love electronic-sounding stuff, just from working with Alan. But anyway, we literally did my first album in two weeks in my living room.”
“One day, I’d compose the sound, the music, the beat,” Lamere says. “So I would make a beat one day, and then the next day, I would just get on that mic. I didn’t have a melody in my head of how I’m gonna perform this thing. I would literally just, like Alan would do, just listen and feel it and emote through it. I might do three or four different takes of different types of performance and then I would have Dante bounce all the vocals over to me on one take, so I could hear all these vocals swirling around. I would then start to edit out, just start removing things, and then see what’s left. You know, it’s a flow. It’s like poetry and motion.”
The motion comes in when Lamere performs live with her two backup dancers, Michelle Pedone and Clio Bildman. Pedone, a noted photographer whose previous stage experience was playing bass and singing in the 80s with the short-lived DC combo “Captain Cupcake and the Custard Cremes,” says that “performing with Liz is a blast!”
“At every gig, Clio and I transform into aliens from outer space, on a mission to backup dance with Liz to the infectious dark disco beats of her universe,” Pedone says. “Her music and energy are magnetic. Once you hear it, you can’t help but want to get up and move!”
Dylan Hundley, the chanteuse behind Darling Black, Lulu Lewis (with Pablo Martin) and the multi-media experience Salon Lulu, recently recruited Lamere for a show at the East Village music venue Berlin. Hundley chose her because “Liz’s approach to minimal, industrial, synth-driven sound is both sharp and reminiscent of her collaborations with her late husband Alan Vega. I love her raw and passionate approach to forging her own distinct path within these types of sound landscapes.”
“It’s hard,” Lamere admits, “ because there is that sense of, where does it fit in? I just try to stay very present in the moment with what it is that I’m creating. And again, coming back to us, Alan told me, if you like it and you’re feeling it, that’s all that matters.”
Follow Liz Lamere at @lamereliz and check out her music on Bandcamp and Spotify.
