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di erent part of your performance. I
have a lot more stage to truly focus on
musicianship, which is cool, but it’s also
kind of scary because it’s very vulner-
able. ere are moments during the
show that are very raw and quiet. You
just have to embrace that silence and be
totally comfortable in your own skin,
focus and make something beautiful.
I think for me this show is a lot more
focused on the emotional side—I can’t
help but get choked up almost every
night at some point.”
Although Lee is an enthralling enter-
tainer who can command a stage of any
size, she’s also incredibly relatable as a
songwriter who isn’t afraid to bare her
soul on record or before a live audience.
Selecting from her catalogue of songs
for either incarnation of
Synthesis
was
literally like going back through her
diary, from her teens through getting
married and becoming a mother in
young adulthood, but the symphonic
setting and ongoing reactions from
listeners nally allowed her to embrace
even the oldest entries.
“ e way we were able to go back
into the past and not just play the same
songs the same way again but to really
open them back up and to breathe new
life into them was really therapeutic,”
Lee reveals. “I was forced to dig back
into some of those very old songs where
… it’s not that I’m embarrassed by them,
but I feel like I’ve grown out of them
in some ways, and to go back, embrace
them, see the beauty in it and love it
again is hard to explain. But that was re-
ally beautiful for me and puts this show
in that space of respect, like respecting
the whole journey and everything that
we’ve been through—the good the bad.
All of us survived, and the band not
only still exists but has become some-
thing so meaningful.”
“Every day that we have a show,
we meet people that have had a really
personal experience with our music,”
Lee continues, “whether it’s through
grief over losing someone, how they
went through processing that and how
our music was a part of that journey, or
overcoming mental illness or depression
or going through a time when things
were really hard and feeling like our
I think for me this show is
a lot more focused on the
emotional side. I can’t help
but get choked up almost
every night at some point.
RAVINIA MAGAZINE | JULY 9 – JULY 22, 2018
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