Every great artist eventually becomes either the beneficiary or the victim of the public’s fascination with them. Lissy Trullie is no exception to this rule. At 25, Trullie already possesses all the preordained paradoxes of a rock star waiting to happen. She is both spotlight performer and wayward drifter, Lower East Side elegant and Bowery chic, wildly popular with all the right people and so totally over it.

In less than two years time, Trullie’s gone from jamming with friends in a crammed rehearsal space to playing full-on gigs at New York City’s Mercury Lounge and Highline Ballroom. She’s been featured in The Village Voice, The New York Press, The New Yorker, Time Out New York, Paste Magazine, Spin magazine, Venus magazine, and Paper magazine (which named Trullie one of its “Beautiful People 2008”). Courtney Love has taken to leaving public comments for her on the band’s MySpace page.

And by the time her debut EP, Self-Taught Learner, dropped this past February, there was already a sense that Trullie could be on the verge of next-big-thing status.

“Like every other artistic endeavor, you grow,” Trullie explains. “The more serious things started to get, the more the tone and the band changed as well.”

Trullie is referring, in part, to her conscious decision to replace her old band, the Fibs, with a whole new line-up, featuring (ex-Saves the Day bassist) Eben D’Amico on guitar, Ian Fenger on bass, and Josh Elrod on drums.

As the new line-up began to gain momentum, so too did the buzz surrounding Trullie. Critics compared her to one of Andy Warhol’s Factory-era “Superstars”—a modern-day cross between the tragic grandeur of Edie Sedgwick and the Norse magnetism of (the Velvet Underground’s) Nico.

“The Warhol thing… I don’t really know,” Trullie says. “I think everyone just has this nostalgia about New York, where they’re trying to recreate this Factory/Warhol thing again, and trying to relate everything that happens here to a certain place in time. And I think that’s sort of an impossible feat. Nobody can really say anything is like that time. New York has changed, the art has changed, the music has changed. I mean, I can understand a music and art scene that’s very specific to New York, but it’s not the same thing.”

While Trullie may downplay any direct connection to that era, she does acknowledge the strong impact that music from those years has had on her sound.

“I’ve always been heavily influenced by bands from the ’50s and ’60s,” Trullie says. “Especially as a teenager, I was influenced by things like punk and post-punk. Grunge was also big. My dad was a record collector, so as a kid I listened to a lot of ’50s and ’60s rock… I’d wake up in the morning and he’d be in his office and he’d throw on some music for me to listen to. I was completely obsessed. I’d put together mix tapes from his records. If you ask him about a record, he’ll know the date it came out and where it debuted on the Billboard charts. It’s incredible how much information he’s retained and how obsessed he is. He’s had a huge influence on my life in that way. It’s sort of a marriage between that and the time when I was a teenager, discovering my own type of music that I thought was cool.”

The pop hooks on Trullie tunes like “Boy Boy” and “Money” clearly take their cues from post-punk and new wave, but what separates her from a slew of other acts with a similar sound is her fuck-all swagger and a genuine sense that she could just as soon kiss you as kill you (for instance, when a friend yelled out, “I love your pussy, Lissy,” during the band’s recent EP release show, Trullie shot back, “I love your pussy too, babydoll”).

Comments like that are built-in parts of the Trullie mystique—an unfiltered way of throwing off the challenge with a shrug. But they’ve also fueled rampant speculation about Trullie’s personal life—and, more to the point—her sexual orientation. (To wit: A recent New York Press profile actually included the phrases “bisexual teenybopper fantasy” and “lesboerotic,” as well as a reference to one specific female in Trullie’s inner-circle “a casualty in [her] trail of broken hearts”).

“People just kind of put words in my mouth because literally no [writer] has ever asked me,” Trullie points out. “I don’t really define myself as anything, but they seem to know a lot more than I do. I don’t even know where they got their information from or what it is exactly. I don’t really have an answer for myself in that sense. Not in a way that I want to hide anything. It’s just not the way I lead my life. Nor do I expect to set those sorts of guidelines for myself. I’m anything and everything and I can do whatever I please, basically.”

While some might respond that PR like that adds a certain mystique to the Trullie brand, it also has a way of overshadowing what her band is trying to accomplish musically.

“It’s been a learning experience for me,” Trullie admits. “It’s a bit surprising doing interviews and really talking about my music, and then reading something and it’s like, ‘Whoa, all they mention is these other things.’”

Among those “other things” are frequent references to Trullie’s past modeling gigs—gigs that included freelance work for magazines like Elle and SOMA.

“The fashion thing is definitely something I did,” Trullie says, “but it was a really long time ago. I’m not ashamed of it or anything. I was a student, it was a good opportunity to make money, and it seemed kind of fun. But I’m surprised everyone keeps calling me a model. I mean, I’ll do stuff for friends from time to time, but I haven’t been a professional model for years.”

For now, Trullie is focused on writing songs for a full-length LP she hopes to record by the summer. While she can’t get into specifics, she does confirm that there is, in fact, major label interest. In between, the plan is to hit the road with the Virgins for a string of West Coast shows throughout the month of May.

“I like touring,” Trullie says. “I think it benefits us all so much. The sound and the ideas… I mean, everything just keeps coming together.”

Indeed it does. But, ultimately, only time will tell whether Trullie’s destined to become the next big thing, or just another media darling du jour.

Watch: “Ready for the Floor” [at youtube.com]

Tags: Lissy Trullie, Self-Taught Learner, American Myth

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Chris Robley’s Drunken Dances and Blue Haikus

Scott Pinkmountain: Free Folk Meets Skron
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The Juke Joint Duo: Cedric Burnside and Lightnin’ Malcolm