- Life and music career -
Childhood And Discovery
Lavie's first musical accomplishment was to win a singing part in a school variety show at age 10. Lavie's older brothers Michael, a hip hop dancer, and Danny, a disk jockey known around Montréal as DJ Devious, were her family musical inspirations. She said she listened devotedly to Mariah Carey.
Childhood And Discovery
Lavie's first musical accomplishment was to win a singing part in a school variety show at age 10. Lavie's older brothers Michael, a hip hop dancer, and Danny, a disk jockey known around Montréal as DJ Devious, were her family musical inspirations. She said she listened devotedly to Mariah Carey.
By age 16 she toured Canada as a backup singer with the French-Canadian hip hop group Dubmatique, performing before thousands. Also at age 16, Lavie had her own demo CD recorded, paid for by $5,000 saved from working as a cashier. For years the demo CD passed from hand to hand in themusic industry. Meanwhile, Lavie worked on the fringes of the music industry, including co-owning and managing HarmonyKaraoke in Montréal starting at age 19.In 2004 her demo CD reached songwriter-producer Ben Margulies, a co-producer of Mariah Carey's first album. Margulies was struck by what he called a "one in a million" voice: "It was like the first time I heard Mariah." Lavie initially thought Margulies' attempts to contact her were friends' hoaxes, playing on her childhood devotion to Carey.After three months, Margulies and Lavie connected. After Lavie sang her original"Guys Are All the Same" to Margulies over a cellphone from a Montréal shopping mall, Margulies responded "I heard something really special in her voice... I said, fly out here right away." Lavie later wrote "I couldn't believe that Mariah Carey's producer had discovered me. From the age of 10 to 17, I don't think I even listened to anybody else. Her voice and melodies captured me." A planned three-day visit to Santa Barbara, California in July, 2004 evolved into a permanent move for the 21 year old Lavie. Margulies founded Boundary Entertainment LLC to launch Lavie's career.
Breaking into the business
Early on, producer Ben Margulies expressed his estimation of Lavie's potential: "Lisa has an undeniably brilliant tone and a vocal quality that is beyond my ability to quantify. ... I've worked with a lot of great singers, and she's got that something extra, something special... everything it takes to be a superstar." "Every video she put up is of her just singing live, from the heart, with that incredible built in sense of believability and credibility."Lavie developed her songwriting ability, her lyrics said to be based on her own life experiences. Lavie is listed as songwriter/composer on all songs of what was to become her first album, including solo songwriter/composer on three tracks.Early professional recognition was limited but distinguished, with Lavie landing songs on the soundtracks of the 2006 motion pictures Stick It starring Jeff Bridges (Lavie's original song "If I Only Knew") and The Guardian starring Kevin Costner and Ashton Kutcher (Lavie's version of "Mockingbird").In August, 2006, Lavie signed as a songwriter/publisher with the performing rights organization Broadcast Music, Incorporated (BMI), formalizing her entry into the profession. She was featured in the "Hitmakers" section of BMI Music World Magazine in spring of 2007. She has regularly attended invitation-only events in the industry, including the BMI Pop Awards beginning in 2006, as well as the October 2008 "City of Hope, Spirit of Life" gala.Even after the movie soundtrack vocals, a career breakthrough remained elusive, relying on personal contacts and networking in media and record labels. Lavie later characterized praises from industry executives as enthusiastic but non-committal, leading Lavie and Margulies to pursue independent production of a firstalbum.
Creating her own buzz
In March, 2007, Lavie opened an account on the video sharing website YouTube, loosely mirrored by her MySpace page. She said she did not anticipate that her do-it-yourself video performances would advance her career. Posting videos of herself singing her own original songs—including two videos of her singing inside a car—Lavie steadily gained YouTube subscribers in her first six months, vowing at that time to try to respond personally to all viewer comments.Lavie's responses to viewers backfired on September 11, 2007. YouTube software interpreted her many replies to viewer comments as computer bot-generated spam, and automatically suspended her account. Her YouTube fans initiated an online petition campaign, and Lavie's YouTube account was reinstated two days after suspension. Lavie portrayed her suspension ordeal—including a wrist brace required to treat carpal tunnel syndrome caused by her hours of typing—in a self-created humorous YouTube video that was to be viewed over 150,000 times in its first year.Within three weeks of her channel's reinstatement, Lavie's video performance of her original song "Angel" was featured on YouTube's front page. The video attracted over one million views in five days. For days surrounding October 3, 2007—when the "Angel" video achieved its 1,000,000th view—Lavie continued to interact with viewers in an online chatroom-like marathon, cementing her reputation as an artist who connects with her fans. An informal collection of YouTube subscribers formed, unofficially dubbed "Team Lavie." Tribute channels and fansites sprung up on YouTube and on the web in general. But past were the days in which she could attempt to respond to every viewer comment: the "Angel" video alone had registered 9,839 viewer comments when it crossed the 1,000,000 view threshold.The YouTube front page feature proved to be a watershed event, garnering attention beyond the website itself. Within the month,Entertainment Tonight (ET) Canada dubbed Lavie an "Internet singing sensation" and "Internet phenomenon", quoting her new designation, "the next Mariah Carey". The following month, CTV's eTalk featured how "music stars" like Lavie would "get to the top on their own terms." In that televised phone interview, Lavie explained how in today's music business, to earn the confidence of skittish record labels, artists themselves have to create their own buzz.After this media exposure, Lavie continued to use Internet websites such as YouTube (mainly), but also MySpace, Facebook, BlogTV and Twitter, to propagate that buzz. She continued to work, personally, on her own promotion and communication with existing fans. Soon thereafter, in December 2007, Lavie was accepted into the YouTube Partner Program, a revenue sharing arrangement offered to YouTube content producers whose videos have achieved a threshold number of views. In February 2008, Lavie was one of three YouTube musicians invited to perform at the "YouTube Event" in New York. The following month, Lavie's video performance of her original song "Angel" was among six YouTube Awards finalists among all of that website's music videos. On the May 13, 2008 iTunes release date of her debut album Everything or Nothing, YouTube's front page featured another Lavie video—her performance of the album's title track. In November 2008, Lavie performed at the San Francisco YouTube Live event.By the end of 2008, the first full calendar year after the ET and eTalk features, Lavie's YouTube account had over 35,000 subscribers, her YouTube videos collectively having 12.7 million views, 96,000 viewer comments, and having been "favorited" over 52,000 times; plays of Lavie's MySpace tracks numbered approximately 1.2 million. In perspective: during 2008 a Lavie video was viewed, on average, every 3.5 seconds. Continuing without affiliation with a major record label, Lavie headlined the 2008 "Sparkle Event" Independence Day concert in Santa Barbara before a crowd estimated at 20,000, and performed at the Gibson Showroom in Beverly Hills in December 2008. Lavie also performed for charity events, such as the televised Santa Barbara Christmas Telethon.Through 2008 and beyond, Lavie continued to post video performances of songs from Everything or Nothing, as well as cover songs and creative collaborations.
