Trullie Madly Deeply
Lissy Trullie first gained notice when she appeared in an early photograph by Ryan McGinley. Depicting her jumping naked in front of a graffiti-covered wall, the image was included in McGinley’s breakout 2003 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art. With her signature ginger tresses and androgynous style, the young New Yorker soon seemed to be everywhere—posing for Imitation of Christ and Hervé Léger, deejaying at the late, lamented Beatrice Inn. But that resumeÌ doesn’t prepare one for the 29-year-old New Yorker’s audacious musical talent. Produced by TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek and John Hill (M.I.A., Santigold), her self-titled debut, out this month on Downtown Records, merges post-punk tension with singer-songwriter heartbreak, proving beguilingly candid and oblique at the same time. “The intimacy was definitely on purpose,” Trullie explains. “I went to art school and was more part of the art world than the music scene; that’s affected a lot of what I do. My music is a whole mess of things I’ve thought about and experimented with—it’s not so cut and dry.” Kind of like Trullie herself.
