For violinist Lindsey Stirling, performance is key to her songwriting
When Lindsey Stirling sits down to write an album, she isn’t thinking only about what she wants to play on her violin and how she’ll arrange the rest of the music around it.
She also keeps in mind how the song could be performed and how it will fit into her highly acclaimed show.
“I’ve always written music not so much because I love the writing process, but because I love performing,” she said. “That’s the whole reason I started getting into the style of music I do. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to do energetic, big performances.’ So it really is a thought when I’m writing.”
That was exactly the case when she started writing the 12 songs that became “Duality,” the album she released in June.
That album spins together classically rooted, Celtic influenced rock and electronic pop songs, a broad stylistic and emotional mix that feels perfectly suited to be transferred, in part, to the stage.
“That’s absolutely true, it’s always kind of fun when there’s a lot of diversity in the music, to figure out how to tell that story on stage and how to make it flow,” Stirling said. “But I feel like that’s always been what I’ve done. I’ve always had quite diverse music that I’ve kind of moved between.
“And I have a little bit of a luxury being that I’m a violinist, and so the thing that people see as the through line is violin,” she said. “So it allows me a little bit wider of a space to play in than a lot of artists who are singers…I feel like I’m lucky in that way.”
Growing up in Arizona, Stirling convinced her parents to let her learn violin at age 5 and she exclusively played classical music until her late teens, when she started to experiment with blending styles.
Stirling’s mix of hip-hop, pop and classical styles and her ability to dance while playing violin got her to the quarterfinal round of “America’s Got Talent” in 2010 and led to a record-smashing YouTube channel that now has more than 1 billion views and landed her a record deal.
Her self-titled debut album arrived in 2012 and it’s been followed by six more albums, counting “Duality.” Stirling feels it’s her best album.
“I feel like I’ve only gotten better and better as a writer at like, capturing emotion through sound,” she said. “I’m really proud of this most recent album, because I feel like people are listening to my heart when they hear this music. It’s really where I was in the last two years while I was writing it.”
Where Stirling was at is reflected in the album’s title, “Duality,” which she says is “about realizing we are so conflicted inside.”
That internal conflict between the brave and confident parts of herself and self doubt, a feeling of failure and being terrified plays out in “Survival,” the last song she wrote for the album.
“I found out that my boyfriend of about three years, he’d been cheating on me, had another girlfriend, full on had another life. It was absolutely mind blowing and really ripped my heart out,” Stirling said.
“Once I had this experience it was like ‘I gotta put it into a song,’” she said “And I had a choice to make — I can write about how I feel right now, I felt broken, I felt like I didn’t know if I’d ever love again. But my heart and brain knew better. I knew I’m gonna heal like my heart has healed before. And so I wrote the song that I knew was true, not the song that I felt at that moment.”
That choice of healing was, characteristically, also made because Stirling wanted to include “Survival” in the show she was crafting for her 2024 tour.
But as the holiday season arrives, Stirling is stepping away from her “Duality” tour to present the latest edition of her holiday show as she tours in November and December, including a stop at Century II on Monday, Dec. 2. The outing is billed as her Snow Waltz tour, named after the 2022 holiday album, a project that happened quite spontaneously.
As 2022 arrived, Stirling was struggling with finding a direction for her next studio album. That’s when her plans took a detour.
“I took a session and did a holiday song,” Stirling said. “And it just flowed so naturally and writing was fun again. So I was just like, you know what, this year is calling for a Christmas album. It’s just what I apparently wanted to do, even though I didn’t know that.
“I decided to start working on it in February (of 2022),” she said of the album that became “Snow Waltz.” “And to meet the deadline, it had to be done by, gosh, the end of April. It was very quick. So it kind of just flowed naturally. It came out fast, thank heavens, but I’m really proud of it.”