There are a couple things you’ll notice right away when listening to this session with Cassandra Lewis. For starters, she’s got her stage patter down. Lewis is right at home in front of an audience and comes across comfortable, confident and strong.
Speaking of strong, there’s the second thing you’ll notice: that voice.
Lewis has everything in the toolkit. She can lilt. She can warble. She can vibrato. She can B-E-L-T. From the floorboards to the rafters, the spaces in which she sings can barely contain her vocals. Thankfully, we enlisted some true audio professionals when setting up our performance space, which Lewis filled with her brand of “cosmic Americana” ahead of a Saturday night appearance at Summerfest’s Miller Lite Oasis.
She alternated between those two skills — easy conversation and powerful musicality — while delivering her first couple songs from most recent album Lost in a Dream. The title track and “More Like Mama” have country inflections that turned our minds back to Kashus Culpepper’s visit just a few days earlier. Both of those songs, as well as “So Bad” to finish off the set, put aside surface-level anything in favor of reflection, depth and honesty.
With so much beauty and emotional heft in her performance, Lewis balanced her visit with a dose of effortless charm in the interview portion. At one point, she explained why her lighter side doesn’t find its way into the music more often, pointing out that she would feel “a little dorky” singing “happy-go-lucky songs.” Although she quickly added that some recent life changes might force her hand.
Talking about some major career moves that saw her tour with Allen Stone and sing with Willie Nelson on stage at Farm Aid, she recapped her year as “a really, really big summer and then a really quiet winter and had time to fall in love very deeply, and now I don’t have any heartbreak songs to write about.”
Fortunately for listeners, Lewis’s empathetic nature allows her to tap into the feelings that fuel her craft, even if she’s not experiencing them right at that moment. It’s not hard to imagine how she honed that ability, moving from city to city (33 in all!) and having to forge and reforge connections. Her secret?
“Well, you find the local dive bar. … And you make friends with the oldest person there, and then it's like home everywhere you go. You get the best stories that way, and often those are the people I relate to.”
With the personality that comes across in this session, relating to others doesn’t seem like a very big hill for Lewis to climb. Listen to the entire thing using the player at the top of the page, and score yourself a seat at our next one by becoming a Radio Milwaukee member today.
Studio MKE: Cassandra Lewis set list
- “Lost in a Dream”
- “More Like Mama”
- “So Bad”
