"You guys get that catalogue, right?" asks Lisa Germano, referring to "Victoria's Secret" -- the sexy underwear-by-mail-order company, and now also the title of a Lisa Germano song. "It should be fun looking through it," says Lisa, "but when you're depressed and you think you're ugly and your boyfriend left you, you really don't need to have this shoved in your face -- full of beautiful breasts and slinky legs."

Lisa sang 'Victoria's Secret' at a benefit for a women's shelter. When she announced the song a heckler yelled out something so abusive that "I told him, if you're going to say that fucking stuff, get the fuck out of here, and the next day the press was all about, oh, she can't control her temper."

Yeah, right. Lisa's problem is she controls her temper too well. Witness "Message From Sophia": "I got home to someone and I walked into the house and there was this really sexy message from a French woman on the machine. And I thought, wow, I caught him. And I confronted him, and he denied it. I decided to just watch him. I just let it go. I wrote that song about it. Later I did get dumped."

This gets us nearly into Lisa's favourite area -- relationships that aren't working out, why the hell you got into them in the first place, and why it's so hard to get out of them. As your English teacher would tell you, there's a conflict here. The trio of songs -- "Bruises", "I Love A Snot" and "Forget It, It's A Mystery" -- work over this ground thoroughly.

Lisa nearly didn't put 'I Love A Snot' on the album. "Ivo said to me, 'I don't know why you want to write a song about snot.' I said, 'No, Ivo, it's not about snot. It's about a snot -- someone who's snotty, someone who's all snobby.' So later I was telling this story to two guys from the 4AD office in L.A., about how Ivo didn't know what a snot was and that it must mean something different in England, and how funny it was that he thought I would even write a song about snot, and they said, 'Actually, we didn't know either until you just told us.' Anyway, the words don't make sense if it's about snot."

"Forget It" was one of several songs on the album that started out mean, according to Lisa, but under the influence of co-producer Paul Mahern, took on a more positive aspect. Mahern -- the man who encouraged Lisa to release her first album -- "was trying to steer me into being more positive. He would burn sage around the house to get rid of evil spirits."

What evil spirits? "I had a bad relationship in the house. Anyway, we switched some of these songs from being hateful to being what they are . I was trying to have a sense of humour."

How many bad relationships have you had? "To be honest, just three or four -- they all end up being the same song because you keep on repeating what you're doing."

And do the guys know the songs are about them? "I think they know. Actually, one person I don't think ever knew, and I wrote whole bunches about him. Anyway, after they've become songs, they're not really about anyone anymore. They're just about situation. They're just songs."

In between the songs on Excerpts from a Love Circus you'll hear plenty of interruptions from Lisa's two cats, Dorothy and Miamo-Tutti. (Among the thank-yous on the sleeve is one for the Blue Sky clinic for saving Miamo-Tutti's life.) Dorothy takes the lead on 'Where's Miamo-Tutti?", whereas Miamo-Tutti's uneasy growling can be heard on "Just a Bad Dream". And on "There's More Kitties in the World Than Just Miamo-Tutti" Lisa gives Dorothy some advice that clearly is really aimed at herself: 'as soon as you quit looking, they'll come around.'

Which brings us neatly to the other song that Lisa nearly left off the album, "Lovesick". She says she thought maybe it was too personal. This from the woman who, on her last album, shared with us the feelings of a woman lying in bed waiting for the guy who's stalking her to break into her house ('a psychopath who says he loves me, and I'm alone and I'm cold and I'm paralysed'). What could be too personal for Lisa Germano?

In the song, a man says to her, 'You're not my Yoko Ono'. Lisa explains the reference: "I didn't realise that I was living in this myth of two people going through life together and supporting each other, no matter what, until he said that to me. John Lennon was a very artistic man. He could have had anyone in the world -- but he chose a woman who challenged him, and they became soul-mates. So for this person to say that to me, he was saying, 'I never loved you, you're not strong enough for me, and we were never soul-mates.' Of course, I should have just said, 'Yeah, and you're no John fuckin' Lennon.'"

So why was this too personal for the album? "Maybe because I do have this stupid dream of trying to find a soul-mate, and that embarrasses me, and because it bugs me that I wasn't strong enough at the time to get out of a very bad relationship because of that dream," says Lisa. "It won't happen again!...Ha, ha, ha,..."