Creativity isn’t something a person can just lock away, not without consequences.

After recording an album when she was 25, Lisa Piccirillo had set aside writing music for a decade and a half for all the usual reasons: Other jobs paid the bills. She got married, and she and husband, Seth Barbiero, bought a home in Norwich. She gave birth to their son, Luca, who’s now 5.

She was still singing, mainly with The Tricksters, the busy cover band she and Barbiero, a bassist, play in. But playing music isn’t the same as writing it. A gloom descended on Piccirillo as she attended to the demands of work and family life.

“Whatever darkness I had been heading toward, when the pandemic hit, that was the last straw,” she said this week.

She and her husband had converted a barn at their Norwich home of 10 years into a studio, and she began rising at 5:30 a.m. to go out there, sit at the piano and see what would happen.

“That was a time when I found I could get in some guilt-free creative time,” she said. “I think that early rising and coming out here and recommitting myself to my art really saved me,” she added.

The result is Radiate, an album of new songs Piccirillo plans to record this year. She is currently in the final week of a Kickstarter campaign to raise $15,000 to pay musicians, engineers, artists, web designers and other specialists to record and promote the album. The crowdfunding campaign, which ends March 31, was about $2,200 short of its goal as of Wednesday afternoon.

“Kickstarter has become the indie, renegade record label,” Piccirillo said.

In that way it’s a fitting venue for her funding of Radiate, which promises to reveal some of her inner renegade. Her first record, Momentum, was very much in the singer-songwriter mold. Piccirillo called it “the record I needed to make when I was 25.”

Radiate “is going to be a little louder, a little more unapologetic,” she said. The lyrics explore identity and the anger arising from restrictions of self-expression.

The recording originated from a kind of daydream Piccirillo had in 2014 in the middle of a shift at Stella’s in Lyme, where she was waiting tables. She envisioned a female figure backlit by the sun and the word of the title. She sketched it out using the crayons the restaurant gave kids for drawing on placemats. It gave her chills, and that feeling returned when she committed to her early-morning studio hours.

An empty studio was where Piccirillo’s musical life began. Her father played in a band with friends and had a studio in their home in Riverside, Conn., a neighborhood of Greenwich.

“It was just this awesome empty space I could go to,” Piccirillo said. “I have memories of when I was 5 or 6 and jamming out to Whitney Houston.”

She sang in school choirs, musical theater productions and talent shows, and continued at Skidmore College, where she was a member of an a cappella ensemble while majoring in elementary education.

Like many musicians, she made her first recordings on a Tascam four-track as a teenager. Her work is more polished now. Momentum was recorded at Lane Gibson Recording and Mastering in Charlotte, Vt., and some of the people she worked with back then have signed on to make Radiate.

Among the musicians are Matt Appleton, who toured with Reel Big Fish, the long-running ska-punk outfit from California; Jeremy Mendecino, an engineer at Lane Gibson; and Gregory Douglas, a Vermont musician now based in California and a longtime collaborator of Piccirillo’s.

“We’ve got a good crew, and we’re not going to stop there,” Piccirillo said. Depending on the success of the Kickstarter campaign, she hopes to bring on a string section.

The aim is “to make the songs as full and stunning as possible,” she said.

Piccirillo turns 40 later this year, and the recording is a kind of birthday gift to herself. Forty is an age when a person feels settled and not “beholden to the world,” she said.

In the meantime, she’s been hearing from people with whom her story of renewed creative work has struck a chord.

“I think it means a lot to people to hear that they can prioritize their creativity,” she said.

For more information and a link to the Kickstarter campaign, go to lisapiccirillo.com.

‘Abstractions’ in Tunbridge

Tunbridge Public Library hosts “Abstractions,” an exhibition of paintings by Chelsea artist Julia Pavone. The show is up now through June 18 and a reception is planned for 2 to 4 p.m. Sunday.

Pavone, a former curator and professor of studio art and art history at the University of Connecticut, is now making art full time and is a founding member of the Chelsea Artist Collective. She works in oil, acrylics and encaustic and often incorporates found objects into her paintings.

Call the library at 802-889-9404 for more information.

Books tend to pile up

In the absence of the Five Colleges Book Sale, which hasn’t happened since 2019, places to donate those unwanted books have been hard to find. Local libraries are usually good outlets, but during the coronavirus pandemic many of them shut their doors to patrons and donated books alike.

BookStock, the annual festival in Woodstock, is planned for this summer, and Norman Williams Public Library, one of the Upper Valley’s stateliest book repositories, is asking for donations. The book sale at BookStock benefits both the festival and the library. Check in with the library’s staff at 802-457-2295 or circ@normanwilliams.org.

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