With Lindsey Stirling, the violin meets whimsy and aerial work
Don’t expect a somber, spotlighted violinist when Lindsey Stirling performs.
“My shows always have really fun costume changes and props, and we’ve built this whole new set, very whimsical set,” the 35-year-old violinist, songwriter and dancer said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles.
“But what’s new this year is that two of my dancers and I have been in aerial training, so we’ll be doing some trapeze work and some lyra (aerial hoop). We’ve been working pretty hard to get our strength and flexibility up so we can do those tricks, and it’s all starting to come together. In one of the aerial numbers, I’ll be playing violin while I’m up in the air, and in another, I’ll be singing,” she said.
That combination of aerial work and musical performance doesn’t exactly come naturally.
“It always feels so impossible at the beginning,” she said. “You have to learn the two things on their own so well that they start to become one, through awkward practicing. There’s always that moment when you start to combine the two, and it’s like, ‘Aghhh! This is awkward and embarrassing and terrible.’ Then all of a sudden, the two things start becoming one muscle memory through your whole body, and that’s when it works.”
She will also be doing some more earthbound Christmas numbers in the show, which present challenges of their own.
“You’ve got to make them familiar, but you’ve got to make them stand out. Everybody and their dog is making a Christmas album these days,” she said. “I have the wonderful luxury that automatically my project is going to be different because it’s instrumental, mostly. There’s a whimsy about my music. I’m always thinking, How can we make this sound magical? How can we make this feel dance-y?”
The violin helps in that quest. “I think the violin has so much emotion in it. And Christmas is all about emotion, whether it’s people feeling spiritual or jovial and happy or nostalgic. There’s nothing better to bring out those emotions than the violin,” she said.
She is not one of those artists who won’t pick favorites among her songs.
“I love ‘Carol of the Bells,’” she said. “I worked really hard to make that the best song on the Christmas album. And then I did the bonus tracks for the album, and ‘I Wonder As I Wander’ became my favorite.”
Stirling, not one to confine herself to a single medium, wrote an autobiography, “The Only Pirate at the Party,” in 2017.
In 2019, she branched out to write a series of six comic books, based on her latest album, “Artemis.”
“As I was making the album, I was trying to figure out what the theme and through-line was, and I really came to love the symbolism that the moon represents,” she said.
“The more I looked into Artemis, who is the goddess of the moon, the more I got interested in her, and before I knew it, I had started to develop a story in my head of this goddess and where she came from and why the moon goes in phases and is sometimes strong and sometimes weak.
“I started thinking, this is more than an album, this is a whole narrative. So it was fun to make the album almost a soundtrack theme to these different moments of the whole story.” Stirling hasn’t run out of ideas yet. “I have some projects that I’ve been writing for film and TV, and I’m hoping that they get greenlighted,” she said. “If so, that’s what I’ll work on a lot next year. If not, it’s all good, I’ll be working on a rock album. I’ve got some plans.”
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