If you live in the Providence area and enjoy art; odds are you have seen Willa Van Nostrand somewhere. It may have been at World’s Fair Gallery, which she owns and operates. She may have served you a garden-to-glass cocktail at an art exhibition with her company Little Bitte Artisinal Cocktails. You may have also seen Willa perform as “Little Bitte,” a persona she created as a form of performance art. Needless to say, she wears lots of hats in the art-world.
“I have this very full spectrum of different creative projects, and I do them all.”
Willa is also a musician. She and her best friend Cody met a decade ago, and quickly bonded over music, eventually forming the band Lezzie Vibez.
“I was running a bar in a gallery, and she came in piggyback on one of our mutual friends, and with all of this energy and all of this, just abundance, Willa says about her first time meeting Cody, “and I felt like, her, I need this girl in my life.”
Both Willa and Cody beam with big smiles sharing the story of first meeting each other. Cody says they sensed right away that Willa was someone they wanted to know.
“I saw Willa for the first time and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, who’s this goddess? And then I started seeing her around town, and then we had a show together in our own bands,” said Cody, who asked not to reveal her last name.
The feeling they both had upon meeting each other quickly materialized into not just music, but both an idea and a band name: Lezzie Vibez.
As Cody explains, “Whenever you’re watching a movie for the first time or listening to a song and there’s two women and you’re like, “Ooh, are they going to fall in love? Or is this Lezzie Vibez?’”
Willa recalls when Cody came up with the phrase for the first time, “I just remember cracking up and being like, yes, Lezzie Vibez is a brilliant way to be able to explain something ... it’s like you can’t really put your finger on it. It’s a noun. It’s a verb. It’s Lezzie Vibez.”
It’s important to note: Lezzie Vibez cannot be said by Willa or Cody in a monotone voice. Lezzie Vibez always has an upward inflection and a flair that reflects its meaning. For them, its point of emphasis that Lezzie Vibez is a celebration of discovering their authentic idenities.
“I have two moms and I grew up in lesbian culture. It’s always been my home culture, Cody explains just after the band performed on “Ocean State Sessions.” “They grew up in Rhode Island and fell in love at summer camp when they were teenagers and then wrote letters to each other for many years. And then (once) they finally were in a place in their lives where they could be romantic with each other, they moved to a town where there was a blossoming queer scene.”
Since their meeting a decade ago, Cody has since moved away from Rhode Island, but Lezzie Vibez continues. Willa and Cody get together every few months to make music and catch up on each other’s lives. They send each other little audio notes with music and song ideas. They describe it as a platonic long-distance relationship, which Willa notes is an important distinction about what Lezzie Vibez can be.
“Lezzie Vibez can be totally platonic,” Willa says. “Cody’s one of my best friends. What we share is, recognizing that we’re both expressing our identity and sexualities on a spectrum. It’s like, this doesn’t have to be binary stuff.”
“The more that you are your own self and figure out how you want to be in the world and how you like to interact in the world, that’s where we’re going to change the world,” Cody adds. “That’s the radical shift we are looking for.”
Check out Lezzie Vibez performing in the season finale of “Ocean State Sessions":
