A Conversation With Lindsey Stirling
Critically acclaimed electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling is back this Christmas with a brand-new Festive album ‘Snow Waltz’ (out now). She’ll be performing a Leeds outstore show on the 7th of November as she starts her 29-date Chrismas tour ‘The Lindsey Stirling Snow Waltz Tour’ of the US starting with three dates in the UK!
Lindsey has entered a futurist world of electronic big beats and animation, using her classical violin training to leap through the music industry garnering over 13M YouTube subscribers and 3M Tik Tok. Her previous #1 selling Christmas album ‘Warmer in The Winter’ amassed 2 billion global streams and nearly 1 million global album equivalents, reaching #1 on the Billboard, iTunes and Amazon Holiday albums chart, as well as reaching #5 on the Billboard Album chart.
NSGs Billy Vitch recently had the pleasure to zoom with Lindsey to talk about her new album and her amazing career to date!
BV: Hi, Lindsey, how are you today? And what have you been up to so far?
LS: Well, I just got up and got ready for you. It’s earlyish here and I’m a bit of a night owl so I don’t wake up early, I stay up super late. But yeah, I’ve just been in Tour mode. I’ve been doing everything from practising, to crafting, to getting in shape, to all the things I do to get ready before a tour.
BV: So you just released your new Christmas album titled ‘Snow Walz‘, (your previous Christmas album) ‘Warmer in the Winter‘ did amazing, reaching the No1 spot on both the US Top Classical Albums and the US Top Holiday Albums in the Billboard Charts! What inspired you to start doing Christmas albums? And did it feel a little daunting at all to do a new Christmas album, coming off the back of the success of the previous one?
LS: You know, I guess I was originally inspired to do a Christmas album because I just love Christmas. I love a good theme and it’s so fun when you get to lean into something that everybody really understands, as the entire world does. There are so many sounds to draw from you know, it’s just like a fun playground for a musician to get to play with all these different songs and sounds and try to make them your own and unique and so I loved working on my first Christmas album, I loved getting to tour it. And over and over again, I’ve gotten to go out there around Christmas time and share this music live with people and so it just kind of was like fun to do it again. I actually really wasn’t intimidated by this project the same way as I do other times, a lot of times I get very nervous or intimidated to write original music. I don’t know, Christmas music is almost like a vacation from, you know, the grunt of like, oh, the hard part of writing. It’s like, Oh, I’m just gonna write some Christmas music. So for me, it’s really fun.
BV: You can take yourself a lot less seriously kind of thing?
LS: I think so. Yeah. Sometimes I do take myself a little too seriously, but not with Christmas tunes (laughs).
BV: The new album comprises of eight cover songs and five originals. Can I ask if was it difficult to decide what songs of yours you wanted to put on it with the originals? Because obviously, it can be quite an eclectic mix, right?
LS: Right! There are so many Christmas songs and you know, I just kind of ticked away at them one by one. I would just brainstorm in my own head and think, what’s a song that I think I could do in a way that’s never been done before? You know, or that I could put like a Lindsey twist on them. And so one by one, I would just listen to different versions of songs like “Feliz Navidad” and I realised nobody’s ever done that in a true flamenco style and pushing it further into like Mexican Sonics and culture. And so I was like, oh, let’s really push that, and so I got with a friend, ‘Mark Ballas‘ from Dancing with the Stars who is an amazing flamenco guitar player. And so, you know, we made that arrangement together. So it’s just really fun to one by one tick away and be like, well what are my favourite songs and what are the ones that I could Lindseyify? So it was really fun.
BV: You can hear that and you really have made them your own as well. It comes through!
LS: Thank you.
(Lindsey Stirling Snow Waltz)
BV: So I’ve been listening to the album this morning, and several songs really stood out to me. Just really emotive songs like “Magic” ft. David Archuleta, one of several vocally driven original numbers on the album (along with “Crazy For Christmas” ft. Bonnie McKee and “Christmas Time With You” ft. Frawley. I read that these songs hold a lot of personal significance for you. Could I ask you a little bit about the meaning of that to you?
LS: Of course. The one that holds the most significance to me, for sure is “Magic”. That song is special to me. We were just rehearsing it yesterday in dance rehearsals, and it was just giving me the chills! I’m so excited to perform that song live for people because it means so much to me. And you know, growing up, I’ve realised that emotions are very complex. Even though sometimes we can be going through a really hard, sad time, or feeling lonely or discouraged there’s always a complex mixture of emotions, like we can still have joy even in those hard times, we can still have that kind of joy that comes from within. And, you know the place I always go back to when I think about that concept is when my dad was passing away. Probably one of the darkest, sad moments of my life as me and my mom and my sisters are all sitting around his hospital bed, knowing he was dying and we were all holding hands and we’re all in silence and then all of a sudden one of my sisters was like let’s say good memories about dad, maybe he can hear us. And so we just started telling memories, our favourite memories of our father and before you know it, we were actually laughing and crying and it was just like the most beautiful moment because even though I was so heartbroken over what I was losing, I was so grateful. Like, the gratitude I felt was just overpowering, of the life that I lived with this man and the father that raised me. And so there’s a line in the song that says, “Who says there can’t be joy when the lights go out” and so that’s what that line represents to me.
BV: That’s such a beautiful insight into such an emotional time for you, thank you for sharing it with us.
BV: Some of the songs on your new album have a really haunting vibe and it’s been mentioned that the name of the album ‘Snow Walz‘ comes from you thinking about the period between Christmas and Halloween as the two seasons overlap. Can you tell us a bit more about that? Like is it quintessentially a Christmas album or is there more to it than that?
LS: Yeah, I did try to tie in a taste of Halloween into a few of the tracks. One was “Snow Waltz”. Like I wanted it to sit in that perfect spot where Harry Potter sits, you know, like I’m a big Harry Potter fan and I think like the whole vibe of the movies, the books and the music of Harry Potter has got a little bit of a spooky feel to it, but it feels so Christmassy at the same time and so that’s kind of what we were going for when we wrote “Snow Waltz” where it feels Christmassy and magical, but at the same time it has that spookiness.
BV: I think Christmas has always had that kinda vibe though you know, especially in Britain.
LS: Oh really? Well yeah, Harry Potter is very British so maybe that is a thing? I feel like in the states we lean on the jolly a little bit more.
BV: Yeh I think we are still very much Victorian in our celebration of Christmas here. You know like Christmas is quite a Victorian affair still in Britain. So that kinda has that little spookiness, I think.
LS: Absolutely, I love that. So yeah, I guess I was just borrowing from you guys then (laughs), to kind of add a little bit of that spookiness to my album you know. Like with “O Come, O Come Emmanuel”, I wanted that to feel like a movie trailer and I wanted it to feel very haunting in the beginning as if it’s the beginning of the trailer and you see, like, we’re flying over Mordor for Lord of the Rings and everybody’s in battle, I just wanted that kind of a feel to it and so it was really fun to try.
Lindsey Stirling – Snow Waltz (Official Music Video)
BV: The video for your song “Snow Waltz” from the album is visually stunning. I was blown away by it, to be honest! How do you come up with the stunning stage and costume designs?
LS: I have so much fun doing that. I have always loved costume design since I was a little kid. I made my first costume when I was eight years old! I made a kangaroo because I wanted to be that for Halloween and we couldn’t find one anywhere so I made it. And ever since then, I think I’ve just had this sense that if I can imagine it, I can probably create it, you know, and so for “Snow Waltz”, it was so much fun. The idea came to me while I was writing the song, I was like, what if a bunch of skeletons that live in Halloween, you know, before they go to sleep, it accidentally switches over to Christmas during the Halloween holidays and they experienced it for the first time. It was just really fun to come up with all the comedy and that like, you know, oh, they would probably be terrified if they saw a puppy because they come from a different world where they don’t have puppies, or the concept of Santa’s sneaking into the house, that would terrify skeletons from Halloween land. So it was really fun to come up with all these ideas and figure out how I could make the costumes and it was just a blast to make.
BV: So you’re about to take the album on a 29-date tour, ‘The Lindsey Stirling Snow Waltz Tour’ and you’re kicking it off in the UK with three dates starting in Leeds. What made you decide to come to the UK? We are really excited that you’re going to come here for those dates!
LS: I am so excited! My managers will confirm this, every year I have begged my agents to take me to the other side of the pond for some Christmas shows and it’s just never worked out and finally this year I was like I really want to do it and so we were able to sneak them in before our US run which is great because I just feel like I’ve never gotten to properly share my Christmas music with the UK or with any of Europe and so I’m so excited to finally get to go over there to share it in person.
BV: So a bit of topic, I recently watched a video of yours where you posted one of your very first shows and the comparisons of what your shows are like now. The transformation has been epic! Coming out right at the beginning, when you started doing this, did you always envision doing big theatrical shows? Was that your vision?
LS: It always was and I think it’s very charming to look back at those beginning shows because I was trying to do all the things that I do now. I was trying to do them then, like, I bought a TV that we carried around with us and brought it into every venue. I put on the TV content I edited together, like content that normally goes on, like a big LED wall, but I was like, well, I can’t afford an LED wall, but I can bring a TV around with me, you know. Even looking at my old costumes I was sewing the extra bits onto my costumes and sewing rhinestones into them and even though I didn’t know how to make a proper costume or scene, (I wasn’t good at stage design yet) but I still had the vision for it and I was learning and I was trying and so, you know, I always envisioned being with dancers and getting to have the fun lighting and props and costume changes. It’s fun to go back and see the charm of when I was like, tiptoeing in the water doing all I could with what I had at the time.
The Lindsey Stirling Snow Waltz Tour
BV: I remember back in 2012, and watching the video of your song “Crystallize”, and being totally blown away with what you were doing, the dancing and playing the violin was so fresh and different to what other people were doing. Do you think there was a specific moment early on when you thought, I’m going to dance and play the violin at the same time or was there a sort of progression into that?
LS: There was a moment when I was a senior in high school, I did a pageant to earn money for college, one of those pageants where you wear beautiful gowns and you perform your chosen talent. And of course, the violin was my talent, but there were like, five different violinists in the competition and we were all going to play these classical concertos and I just was like, well, I’m not going to stand out at all am I! What could I possibly do to stand out? And man, I was telling my mom that I wish I had a fun talent, you know, there are these dancers that are so cool and their performances are so much fun to watch, I think she was a little bit annoyed with me because she’s like, I’ve paid for violin lessons your whole life and here you are telling me you wish you had a fun or talent, you know. And so she said, well make it fun! If you want to, then you should dance around when you play, and add some movement. And I was like, Oh, that’s it! That’s an interesting idea! And so anyways, I ended up writing a rock song, instead of doing the classical piece, and I ended up choreographing little dance moves to it, it was more supposed to be comedic than beautiful, because that’s all I could do at the time was like these funny little moves, it was almost more pantomiming. But it just blew my mind, the audience’s reaction and the whole experience.
BV: So it took some time to be able to dance the way you do now?
LS: Yeah, I couldn’t do that then, it was very, very, stiff and rudimentary but I felt so alive as I did it and I was like, Ah, I could make this a thing. I could do this more!
BV: Your story is extremely inspirational. I read recently that you’re a motivational speaker in your own time, using your own story around anorexia to help others. Could you tell us a bit more about this? I think it’s such an important subject.
LS: I love to talk about it and share because it feels like so many people feel alone and isolated in this subject and those feelings. I just try to share my thoughts, whether it’s motivational speaking, or whether it’s like a song that’s symbolic or a music video, or even just sharing positive messaging through my social media. I just love to have a very open conversation about it and share that like, you know, gosh, once upon a time, I hated myself and I thought that that was going to be how I always felt, I just thought that’s how I am. This is how life is, some people are happy, and some people aren’t and unfortunately, I’m one of the ones that’s sad. And so I just really hope to share with people that whether you’re going through Anorexia, or Anxiety or Depression or like whatever it is you’re facing in life, I want to share that there’s hope and that the way you feel about yourself today is not the way that you are going to or have to feel about yourself for the rest of your life. Like you can listen to that dialogue in your mind but there are steps to take to get better and it starts with first of all just being aware that maybe this isn’t how I have to be, maybe there’s another version of myself that’s buried in here by all of these voices in my head that are telling me I hate myself, that are saying that I’m ugly, that are saying I’m worthless and are saying all these horrible things and to stop that dialogue, you know, it takes time to learn to separate the different voices, like the voice of anorexia, the voice of depression, the voice of fear, and realise that there’s another voice inside that’s you, and it’s so much stronger and that it’s just been muted by all the noise from the other voices!
BV: I totally agree!
(Lindsey Stirling)
BV: So after the tour, how’s the next year looking for Lindsey Stirling?
LS: The next year, I’m hoping to tour some more next year. I’m hoping to get back to your side of the pond again for like another full tour and then I’m working on some new music that I’m going to be releasing next year
BV: That’s awesome. Thank you so much for your time, and good luck with the tour and merry Christmas as well.
LS: Thank you Billy!
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