Lissie was born Elisabeth Corrin Maurus, the youngest of four children and raised in Rock Island, Illinois. Her father is a physician and her mother, who is of Swedish ancestry, is an interior designer. She was interested in singing and music from an early age. She played the title role of the musical Annie at the age of nine. "In high school it seems like everyone has more drama than any other time in their life. So that was the time in my life where I really leaned on music as a way to stay sane," she said in an interview.
In her senior year of high school, she was expelled over what she described as "something stupid that I did, but it was sort of like the culmination of just a lot of negative things that had happened". She got her diploma at an alternative outreach center. She spent two years at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, during which time she would open for musicians who visited the city. She collaborated with DJ Harry of SCI Fidelity Records on the song "All My Life", which was featured on television shows House, The O.C., Veronica Mars and Wildfire. After spending a semester in Paris, she finished her studies to pursue a career in music. In 2007, she produced a four-song EP that received some airplay on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic.
In early 2008, Lenny Kravitz invited her to be the opening act for his Love Revolution Tour, after a friend tipped him about her MySpace page. Later that year, "The Longest Road", a song she co-wrote with DJ Morgan Page reached No. 4 on Billboard's Hot Dance Club Songs chart. "We met under that idea that he was going to remix a song of mine ... But we decided to work on a new song together", she told the Quad-City Times. The Deadmau5 remix of the track was nominated for a Grammy in the "Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical" category.

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