January 20, 2004

Case Study
by Paulette Thomas

THE PROBLEM: How to turn a love for an obscure musical instrument into a living.

Growing up in Southern California, Lisa Lynne bought her first guitar in second grade. She played bass in all-girl rock bands, performing at biker bars, military bases, and other out-of-the-way places.

At a Renaissance fair, she discovered the Celtic harp, and was smitten. "It was love at first sound," she says. She taught herself by playing along to old Pink Floyd records, and made it her unlikely goal to make her living on the instrument. She played at weddings, funerals, shopping malls. She became a regular at fairs and festivals, wheeling in her 25-pound instrument on a dolly. She secured an endorsement from a harpmaker who provided her with instruments. In hopes of a record deal, she mailed tapes of her harp compositions to music labels. Most came back unopened.

THE SOLUTION: Every single day she did at least one thing -- no matter how small -- toward her goal. "My key word was 'today,' " she says. "What can I do today to move this forward?"

As her record-label rejections piled up, she looked for new avenues."It's such a huge world, why think about just this country?" She mailed off a new round of tapes to foreign labels, working from addresses she copied in record stores. This time, a German producer called.

Soon she was boarding a plane for Germany, where she recorded three albums in three years. But she found the artistic side of the engagement unappealing. On the album covers, "I was shellacked with giant hair and cleavage," she says. "They put saxophones and disco beats behind me."

Back home, she was determined to stay true to herself. Even as she pursued record deals, she spent time at hospitals, and established a well-regarded program at City of Hope National Medical Center in the Los Angeles suburb of Duarte, where she performs and encourages patients to experiment on her harps.

But her German experience gave her credibility, and she recorded for Celestial Winds and new-age giant Windham Hill. Her most recent label, New Earth, pushed her work into the listening kiosks at Barnes & Noble and Borders stores, which propelled her latest CD into the New Age Top10. She finds it significant that this work, "Hopes and Dreams," is a heartfelt compilation of lullabies she wrote for ailing patients at City of Hope.

She's now sold a half million CDs, some of them from her own Web site, LisaLynne.com. She teaches a class at a local program to artists looking to develop their business skills.

THE LESSON: "So many fine artists only get rejection, but they are just going down the same tired, beaten paths," says Ms. Lynne. "They have to find new paths."