Lisa Miller

Lisa Miller recorded in several different decades as a solo artist and session singer, and sang on a duet that was featured on a Top Five hit single in 1983. She might be most known (at least for work issued under her original name, Lisa Miller), however, for music she recorded before she entered her teens, and which was unreleased at the time. Discovered by chance by Motown as an eight-year-old in Los Angeles in 1965, the company issued a single by her later that year. Though she recorded almost a dozen more tracks for Motown and appeared on the television show Hullabaloo, the label didn't release anything else by Miller. That left her mother and aunt, both of whom were recording artists and songwriters, to get her a deal with the new Canterbury label, on which she issued a single in late 1967. Also in 1967, Miller recorded about an album's worth of material for Canterbury. Despite her youth, the tracks were not novelties. Her voice was far more mature than her years would have led anyone to expect, and few would have guessed she was only ten or 11 when they were laid down. Also, the material -- most of it written by her mother, Kay Lewis, and her aunt, Helen Lewis -- and production created some fairly solid orchestrated pop/rock, if longer on potential than realized promise. But though a small quantity of promotional LPs were pressed, it wasn't released. The ten tracks did finally appear on the 2010 Sundazed CD Within Myself, which added the 1967 single "Love Is"/"The Loneliest Christmas Tree" as bonus cuts. The singer soon released a single on the Bell subsidiary Cyclone, billed as Lise Miller. But she didn't establish a recording career as a solo artist, though she did voice-overs for television series and, in 1983, sang (as Leeza Miller, with Joe Pizzulo) on the number four Sergio Mendes hit "Never Gonna Let You Go." As of the release of Within Myself, she was working on a solo project of original material. ~ Richie Unterberger