Lisa Marie Simmons has been on stage since she was fifteen. She moved from Boulder to New York at nineteen to study theater and music, and she believed what a lot of young artists believe: that the tortured artist needs a drink to get up there and bare her heart. She bought all in. By her own account, she was messed up for most of the five years she spent in New York.
She is sixty now, living on Lake Garda in Italy, writing and recording with her husband Marco Cremaschini. She didn’t get sober. She reined it in, mostly in her forties, and she’s careful about how she describes what changed. “I absolutely have found that reducing it has given me more energy and more clarity.” That’s the claim she’ll make. She won’t make a bigger one.
What makes this conversation worth your time is how specific she gets about the cost. Not the moral cost. The working cost. Dry vocal cords that stick instead of vibrating cleanly. A thick tongue that blurs the words she works hard to enunciate. One more error to avoid on a night when there are already plenty.
And underneath all of it, the thing she keeps circling back to: if the song is arriving from somewhere outside of you, you have to be awake enough to hear it.
Show Notes
[02:38] The Tortured Artist Myth
Lisa names the old trope directly: that artists need to drink in order to write or to perform. She says she was a victim of it early in her career.
Getting on a stage is frightening. She used alcohol as a crutch to get past the fear of standing in front of people and baring her heart.
She now sees the flow-state version of the same myth as a misconception. Alcohol is not the best way to find that state.
Key Insight: “And as you mentioned, I absolutely have found that reducing it has given me more energy and more clarity.”
[05:24] New York in the Nineties
She describes a tumultuous childhood: re-homed after a first adoption, adopted again, then foster homes. “I’m not an original,” she says of the pain.
She arrived in New York at nineteen and let loose. She sees it now as her way of dealing with everything that came before.
She stayed until she was twenty-four, drinking and using, in a scene where cocaine was everywhere. A job singing in the south of France was the first thing that made her start reining it in.
She didn’t really rein it in until her forties.
Key Insight: “And I’d say I was messed up most of that time.”
[09:10] Why the Culture Makes It So Hard
Josh and Lisa talk about music venues where everybody is drinking, and how saying no can feel like getting banished from the pack.
Lisa extends it to the ritual around the gig: a drink and a cigarette while you wait to start, a drink while you break down the stage, a drink to come down from the high.
She lives in Italy and there’s wine, which is part of why she isn’t sober. It’s just no longer a daily thing.
Key Insight: “And I think that’s the thing with alcohol. There’s always a reason to imbibe if you look for one, right?”
[11:05] What “Messy” Actually Means on Stage
Less precision with notes and intonation. Stumbling over words. A tongue that thickens.
She’s a professional with decades of experience, so she doesn’t think the audience sees it. She feels it, and that feeling is what can derail a performance.
Alcohol also dries out the vocal cords. She explains the mechanics: the cords vibrate against each other, then open to let air through. Dry cords stick, and control goes.
Key Insight: “It’s one more error that you have to avoid that you can just easily avoid by not drinking.”
[13:07] Replacing the Pre-Show Drink
Most performers have a routine before they go on, something Lisa calls talismanic. Hers used to include alcohol.
Now it’s meditation. She breathes, gets into a space, and looks for the flow state so she can be as open as possible for the audience.
The rest of the list is plain and practical: tea for her throat, good hydration, sleep the night before, a nap if sleep didn’t happen, clothing that feels good, jewelry that makes her feel protected.
Key Insight: “All of these things are such a great replacement for alcohol.”
[16:36] A Listener Question on Alcohol Advertising
A listener asks whether alcohol ads work against accurate medical information about alcohol’s toxicity.
Lisa’s answer is careful. She says probably, but she doesn’t know. Businesses advertise toward the positive because their bottom line depends on us consuming.
She points to cigarettes as the example: advertised as cool in the thirties and forties, smoked by every movie star, and the public was deceived for decades about the harm.
Josh brings up research on alcohol and inflammation in the brain, and how long that inflammation can last, even after just a few drinks.
Key Insight: “I think there could be studies that are out there about the toxicity of alcohol, of which we’re unaware. That’s possible.”
[21:14] Meditation, the Imposter, and Capturing the Ephemeral
Lisa discovered meditation at fifteen in a high school drama class, under a teacher named Rita Cotter. She had the sensation of leaving her body and looking down at the room, and a sense of peace she calls enormous. She has not stopped since.
She uses it to quiet the imposter voice, the one that says it’s arrogant to think you could be the author of something.
She talks about what she’s actually reaching for: the most honest thing, the nugget of truth, the inner landscape that nobody else can climb inside of.
Josh shares The Clear Hour, a monthly Sober Creative gathering that opens with a guided creative meditation and then lets people make something.
Key Insight: “It is about capturing the ephemeral and gifting it.”
[26:31] The Highway of Creativity
Before the internet, songwriters in different parts of the world would write about the same themes or land on similar melodies. Lisa takes that as evidence of something you can tap into.
The songs she loves most are the ones that feel like they didn’t come from her at all.
This is where her argument about drinking lands hardest. If the material is arriving, you need your antenna working.
Key Insight: “It feels like I’m a vessel for that thing. And again, how do you hear that? How can you be receptive to that if you are drinking?”
[32:22] Morning Pages and Sitting With What’s Uncomfortable
Lisa keeps shelves of notebooks full of scribblings that will never be published. Three pages in the morning, no punctuation, no editing, no deciding whose voice it’s in.
She calls it another way to get rid of the imposter without drinking to do it. Josh points out it might also help around five o’clock, when the craving tends to show up.
The conversation turns to discomfort: that we aren’t built to sit with it, and that the hard passages are where the growth happens if we let ourselves feel them.
On comparing pain, she’s direct. Everybody she knows had something happen in childhood.
Key Insight: “There’s no hierarchy of pain, right?”
Key Quotes
“It is about capturing the ephemeral and gifting it.” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“And I think that’s the thing with alcohol. There’s always a reason to imbibe if you look for one, right?” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“How do you hear it? How does that truth resonate if you’ve got this thing and this fog in front of it?” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“It’s one more error that you have to avoid that you can just easily avoid by not drinking.” — Lisa Marie Simmons
“I’m all about storytelling. That’s how we learn empathy. That’s how we grow. Storytelling is everything.” — Lisa Marie Simmons
Resources Mentioned
Morning pages — the practice of writing three unedited pages first thing in the morning
Meditation as a pre-performance ritual — breathing into a flow state before going on stage
Insight Timer — where Josh has guided meditation practices available
The Clear Hour — The Sober Creative’s free monthly session: a guided creative meditation, then time to make something. Anyone can join.
Lisa’s Substack essay on her mentor Rita Cotter — the teacher who introduced her to meditation at fifteen
Where to Find Lisa Marie Simmons
Website: lisamariesimmons.com
Bandcamp: the best place to support her directly, since artists actually earn from purchases there
Streaming: her music is everywhere under her name, Lisa Marie Simmons
DAWTA The Podcast: her show with Dionne Draper on the transracial adoptee experience
What’s next for Lisa:
October 1–6: in New York for a book launch supporting her friend Phoebe Boswell, and a visit to the Recording Academy, where she has an album up for members’ consideration
November 13: back at Carnegie Hall as a guest of Charu Suri. Tickets are on sale now.
Thank You
A heartfelt thank you to EG, mike stock, Deborah Taylor, and everyone who joined us live for this conversation, and to Lisa Marie Simmons for her generosity, her honesty, and for giving us a look inside how the work actually gets made. Your presence and engagement make these conversations possible.
This was episode 70. Seventy people, seventy different paths, and every one of them has given us something worth keeping.
What If the Fog Is the Only Thing Between You and the Work?
Lisa was talking about the songs that carry real truth, the ones with no hiding in them, and she asked how you’re supposed to hear that truth with fog in front of it.
Most of us aren’t asking whether alcohol is ruining our lives. We’re wondering if this next question is worth doing something about it. Is it costing me something in my work that I can’t quite name? More energy. More clarity. A workday that goes further. Those are the things Lisa could point to, and she’s the first to say the rest is hard to quantify.
Thirty days is enough time to find out for yourself.
The Sober Creative Reset is a 30-day 1:1 program built for those who want to test that question without signing up for a lifetime identity. Weekly 60-minute sessions, one on one with me. You bring the work you’re trying to do. We look at what’s actually in the way.
I take five new 1:1 clients a month, and most people start within two weeks.
P.S. Missed a previous conversation? Every episode and newsletter lives in the archive at thesobercreative.com. Worth a scroll if you’re new here.
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