Waiting for a better day, more pay, to lose weight or our next date, we all seem to be waiting for something. However, in her new album, Waiting to Fly, Lisa Richards encourages us all to stop putting things off and make the leap. She will be officially launching the record at The Street Theatre on Saturday 26 November.

“It’s all of those things that I told myself I couldn’t do. You’ll never be able to sing, or you’ll never be able to produce yourself, or record your own album, that has turned out to be not true. So, I think the idea is, that it’s time to fly,” she says.

Richards wrote, recorded, and produced the album from the studio she built in her own North Canberra home during the pandemic. She says it was due to funding from Arts ACT that she was able to learn the skills she needed, even if she doubted her ability to do so.

“I learned to use Logic Pro X and record and produce, and I wrote a bunch of songs, and really it was just how I kept myself from going mad.”

Soon, she had five completed songs, but the pandemic was still going on, so she wrote a few more and then another few. Much to her own disbelief, Richards had completed an album she produced herself, taking all the steps from hiring and organising musicians to singing and the finishing touches. 

With everything locked down, Richards built her own recording studio; she knows a lot of people who own home studios that forwent expensive soundproofing, so she decided not to do it either. Rather she made a space in her home office with sound-absorbing materials, thick curtains, and all of her equipment.

The album features deeply personal works, including two songs dedicated to her father who passed away aged 102 during the pandemic. Richards tried to take the right steps to get permission to travel to Brisbane, but unfortunately, she missed the last few weeks of her father’s life and his funeral.

“He loved Louie Armstrong and When The Saints Go Marching In and I think he would have really loved to have a New Orleans jazz funeral with people walking down the street playing trombones. It was that kind of spirit that I took into the recording,” she says.

Richards didn’t grow up playing music, though she thinks she would have loved it. Her mother, who played the piano, was left with a severe brain injury after an accident when Richards was seven. Shortly after, her father sold the piano and, though it was never a spoken rule, Richards and her siblings didn’t pick up an instrument thereafter.

Aged around 20, a small inner voice encouraged Richards to sing, however, the doubting voice asking who she thought she was continued to drown it out. During her first stint living in Canberra, she enrolled in an audio engineering course, and while working on a collaborative project, her partner encouraged her to sing the song she had written. 

“The guy in the studio was like, ‘you know, you have a really amazing voice – you could sing anything’ and I’m like, ‘I didn’t actually know that’. So, then I started playing that for people and I ended up joining a band in Canberra.”

Progress was incremental. From her band in Canberra, Richards went to Sydney where things slowed down due to her struggles with drugs and alcohol; this was where she hit rock bottom. It started years beforehand with her first exposure to drugs being when she was four or five and her parents gave her anti-psychotic medication. Her mother had her own addiction problems, so the pills were a helper when she and her brother, the youngest of eight children, became “too much”.

The drinking started around age seven, when she first experienced what it was like to be drunk. Things worsened and by age 14, Richards was being regularly sexually abused by three men. As she entered her adult years, she found herself drawn to the wrong kind of men and using hard drugs.

During a time when she was singing acapella on the sidewalks of Sydney, she found herself walking down the street headed in one of two directions. She could either go back to her ex-boyfriends to score again or she could make a different choice and go to Brackets and Jam at Crossroads Theatre.

“They asked if anyone wanted to do a poem and I said I’ll sing a song. I got up and sang a Nina Simone song, Plain Gold Ring. This guy came up afterward and he’s like ‘oh my god, I want you to work with me’,” she says.

Richards went with him to a cave concert in the largest limestone cave in the southern hemisphere; she doesn’t know how they got the permission, but she was awestruck. It was there she met actor Jack Thompson who was playing the harmonica that night.

“We all wrote a bunch of songs together. Anyway, I ended up in New York. Our drummer was American, I went over there with him to take our demo tape around to some record companies and then I just decided I needed to live there,” she says.

Richards performed solo when schedules clashed, and learned how to play guitar, though she admits she never mastered it. She performed her new songs accompanied by the two chords of the guitar she knew, and then played by ear.

“I started playing guitar at 30 because everybody that I was writing songs with was married or had children and they were not available when I wanted to write songs,” she smiles.

Her next step was to get a manager. Although progress has been full of hiccups, rehab, a broken marriage, moving continents, new love, and returning home, it has been worth it every step of the way.

“Music has given me a life worth living. I see everything through music because I got clean and sober because I wanted to play music. I knew nothing was going to work out for me unless I changed my life,” Richards says.

“I think it’s important for people to know that we aren’t defined by our histories and that we can change, we can have a different life.”

Lisa Richards launches her new album Waiting to Fly at The Street, Saturday 26 November 7.30 pm; thestreet.org.au

Get local, national and world news, plus sport, entertainment, lifestyle, competitions and more delivered straight to your inbox with the Canberra Daily Daily Newsletter. Sign up here.