Lindsey Stirling to bring her story to the Macon stage

When Lindsey Stirling writes an album, she’s not just thinking about what she wants to play on her violin and how she’ll arrange the rest of the music around it.

She always keeps in mind how the song could be performed and how it will fit into her highly acclaimed show. 

Fans will see Stirling’s careful planning and intentional creative choices come to life for her July 21 show at Macon’s Atrium Health Amphitheater.

“I’ve always written music not so much because I love the writing process, but because I love performing,” she said. “That’s the whole reason I started getting into the style of music I do. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I want to do energetic, big performances.’ So it really is a thought when I’m writing.”

That was exactly the case when she started writing the 12 songs that became “Duality,” the album she released in June 2024.

That album spins together classically rooted, Celtic influenced rock and electronic pop songs — a broad stylistic and emotional mix that feels perfectly suited to be transferred, in part, to the stage.

“That’s absolutely true, it’s always kind of fun when there’s a lot of diversity in the music, to figure out how to tell that story on stage and how to make it flow,” Stirling said. “But I feel like that’s always been what I’ve done. I’ve always had quite diverse music that I’ve moved between. 

“And I have a little bit of a luxury being that I’m a violinist, and so the thing that people see as the through line is violin,” she said. “So it allows me a little bit wider of a space to play in than a lot of artists who are singers…I feel like I’m lucky in that way.”

Growing up in Arizona, Stirling convinced her parents to let her learn violin at age 5 and she exclusively played classical music until her late teens, when she joined a couple bands and wrote her first rock song.

By her mid-20s, Stirling was ready to more fully break away from classical and create her own kind of music.

“I’d always been told exactly what to play and how to play it,” she said. “The classical violinist, you’re just kind of regurgitating what has been played by hundreds of people for hundreds of years. I just got so burnt out. I was like ‘Gosh, what would I want to play? What would I want to say?’ And I started to write. And that’s when I really fell in love with the violin all over again”

Stirling’s mix of hip-hop, pop and classical styles and her ability to dance while playing violin got her to the quarterfinal round of “America’s Got Talent” in 2010 and led to a record-smashing YouTube channel that now has more than 1 billion views and landed her a record deal.

“That’s when I just started to really experiment,” she said. “I kind of found a sound I liked. So my first album really wasn’t very theme-based. It was more like ‘Here’s a bunch of sounds that I think sound cool together.’”

That self-titled 2012 release, has been followed by six more albums that, unlike her debut, have themes, some personal, and in the case of 2022’s “Snow Waltz,” a holiday orientation.

“Duality” is her sixth and in Stirling’s view, best album.

“I feel like I’ve only gotten better and better as a writer at capturing emotion through sound,” she said. “I’m really proud of this most recent album, because I feel like people are listening to my heart when they hear this music. It’s really where I was in the last two years while I was writing it.”

Where Stirling was at is reflected in the album’s title “Duality,” which she says is “about realizing we are so conflicted inside.” 

That internal conflict between the brave and confident parts of herself and self doubt, a feeling of failure and being terrified plays out in “Survival,” the last song she wrote for the album. 

“If we want to get real personal, here’s how it actually came about,” she said. “My album was pretty much done, and then I found out that my boyfriend of about three years, he’d been cheating on me, had another girlfriend, full on had another life. It was absolutely mind blowing and really ripped my heart out…

“Once I had this experience of it was like ‘I gotta put it into a song.’ So I had time to write one more,” Stirling said. “And I had a choice to make — I can write about how I feel right now: I felt broken, I felt like I didn’t know if I’d ever love again. But my heart and brain knew better. I knew I’m gonna heal like my heart has healed before. And so I wrote the song that I knew was true, not the song that I felt at that moment.”

As hands-on as any artist can be, Stirling works on every aspect of her live show, from concept and flow to costumes, set design, aerial choreography and the set list that brings it all together.  

The show is my baby, for sure,” she said. “I feel like that’s one of the things I’m best at. I don’t think my best gift is writing the music. I don’t think my best gift is even being a violinist. 

“I think my best gift is actually being able to tell a story, and being able to do it on stage in a long form and put on a show, I think that’s the thing I’m really good at – making a show.”