Lindsey Stirling bringing hits list to Iowa State Fair Grandstand in Des Moines

An exhausted Lindsey Stirling was in a hotel room in Rome, trying to recover from a performance earlier that July evening while talking about the tour that she’d be moving from Europe to the U.S. in a couple weeks.

“I did a show tonight and I just got out of an Epsom salt bath to try to make my muscles relax,” Stirling said. “It's a pretty strenuous athletic show. It's either gonna make me crippled by 40 or it's gonna keep me going forever. I'm not sure.”

That’s the show that the dynamic violinist and dancer will take across the United States in August and September — including an Aug. 16 appearance at the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines.

This tour comes a few months short of a year after she’d played an extensive tour behind “Snow Waltz,” her holiday-themed album, not exactly the music that would be appropriate for a summer tour.

“We are doing one Christmas song — I know that may sound crazy,” she said. “Shockingly enough, my version of ‘Carol of the Bells’ is one of my top streaming songs today. It’s still streaming strong in the summer, which blows my mind. So I was like, ‘You know what, why not give the people what they want?’

“But the rest of it, I’m not promoting an album right now, so I’ve got no new music,” Stirling said. “So it was a chance to just look back and be like, ‘What are my favorite songs to perform live?’ We’ve got two epic covers, one of which is a classical song that I’ve re-imagined and I’m going to play, which is terrifying to me.”

It’s perhaps surprising that playing a classical violin solo terrifies Stirling. But, she said the trepidation is rooted in her relationship with classical music and in the contrast of styles between classical violin and her signature amalgamation of pop, hip-hop, rock and electronic music.

“I grew up playing classical music all the way up through my teenage years ’til I went to college,” she said. “The classical community can be quite cutthroat. It's a hard world to be a part of, and I felt like I got a little burned by it. So I almost had a breakup with classical music years ago, after I started my own journey with this different kind of music.

“Now come back to it and be like, ‘Hey, this is a skill I haven't exercised in a long time,’ but it's a part of what made me fall in love with the violin,” she said. “So we're gonna make up. It’s very, very different to play classical music or this messy style of what rock and pop can be.

“Classical is pristine, and you can't do that. So it's just kind of working a muscle. It’s as if you went to a pop singer’s concert, and she suddenly busted into an opera. It’s such a different style. It would be like, ‘Whoa.’ That's how classical music feels to me. It’s a stretch. It’s hard.”

Stirling’s breakup with classical music, which came after a much-criticized performance she did with a symphony orchestra in London, came a few years after she made the transition away from pure classical violin.

“I thought, ‘I’m good enough to make it in the classical world. I’ll be somewhere in the back of the orchestra. But I’m never gonna get to choose what I play. I’m never gonna get to be a soloist,’ ” she said.

“That was a moment where I needed to figure out what I liked about this and if I want to keep going enough to do that. That’s when I ended up swaying a little bit.”

AGT springboard

That sway had started when Stirling joined a rock band while in high school in Arizona. But it really took off when started writing the music that earned her the designation of “hip-hop violinist” when she appeared on “America’s Got Talent” in 2010.

That performance led to her music video for “Spontaneous Me,” which was uploaded to her YouTube channel, where her videos received millions of views, propelling her to stardom.

Two years later, Stirling, who had experimented with adding dubstep and other electronic music to her compositions, released her 2012 self-titled debut album. That was also when Stirling began dancing — a rarity for a violinist.

“I was really awkward looking for a while and you know, I'm still a work in progress because I feel like I’m trying to keep up with these kids who’ve danced their whole lives,” Stirling said. “But I feel like I've come such a long way. And I'm pretty proud of all that effort because it was years of work.”

That work is manifested in the live show that Stirling painstakingly puts together for each of her tours, blending the music from her six albums, with tightly choreographed dancing, aerials and striking lighting.

“I do put months of work into every show,” she said. “It's one thing to have a set list, but then to figure out all those transitions and where to put costume changes, where to put the dancers, when to put in the talking moments, when to have enough time to get on the aerial apparatus and how to get down smoothly, all these little things.

“It takes a lot to make a show feel effortless and smooth.”