Leo - TIDXLS debut CD Release Show, Friday, June 10 at Ambleside Youth Centre, West Vancouver, 7pm. $5 cover.
A press release provides real insight about as often as a fortune cookie houses an actual fortune; but there are exceptions.
The blurb promoting Leo’s Ambleside Youth Centre performance tonight – in flagrant violation of the rules of public relations – credits the 16-year-old singer for: “relating stories of teenage existence.”
It’s an oddly revealing choice of words.
Not stories of love or loss. Existence.
Hers isn’t the epic moping of The Smiths, with their ode to the ten ton truck that kills the both of us, nor the unbounded joy of love and sex and magic, it’s not punk or protest or trying to sell Pepsi. It exists.
Leo (also known as Carson Graham student Amy Williams) makes music that has the listener searching for a teenager’s psyche through the black, wavery sheen of an ocean at night.
Water runs through her TIDXLS, giving it a dream-like quality that never quite approaches reality or dry land.
Asked if her mid-tempo track “Swimming Pools” is tragic or romantic, Leo laughs.
“A little bit of both,” she replies.
Is it a dark album?
“Some songs are dark.”
A frequent poet, Leo tends to search for melodies on an acoustic guitar, looking for a place where her poems belong.
“When I play guitar, melodies sometimes come into my head and then that’s when my poetry comes in play. I can use it for lyrics,” she explains.
Her debut album’s sound is reminiscent of Lorde and “modern-Justin Bieber,” according to producer Liam Sturgess. However, the release nearly had an indie-rock sound, Leo explains.
“When I started working the album I was listening to a lot of rock music like Jack White and Led Zeppelin,” she says. “That was kind of forced for me.”
After spending a year in West Vancouver studio Four Destinations, Leo decided to let her first effort slide down the drain.
“We scrapped everything we had,” Sturgess recalls, laughing.
While it hurt just “a little” to bid farewell to the grunge rock sound, Sturgess said the finished album is “still kind of weird and experimental.”
At age eight, Leo says her lyrics consisted of Hannah Montanaesque attempts to sneak out of the house. Now, with half her life spent playing, singing and writing, her songs are still coloured by a longing for escape.
Much of her childhood was spent on a Toronto waterfront property. When she was stressed, her father – who also taught her how to play guitar – would tell her to go with the flow and not get caught in the current.
Thinking about the water that surrounded her childhood is a type of therapy, according to Leo. She’s hoping that urge to recapture something from childhood will find resonance among her peers.
“I am a teen so I’d say it goes out primarily to my fellow teens because they can relate to some of the same things I’m going through,” she says about her album.
The album is a release from Four Destinations, an independent label born in a West Vancouver basement.
Having shared a baseball field and Sentinel secondary’s musical theatre program, musicians Sturgess and Alex Balanko devised the label in the uncertain days after high school graduation.
“There was a lot of anxiety flowing through our veins,” Sturgess recalls of those brainstorming sessions in the basement. “Finding something cool and new like that … was really reassuring so we grabbed hold of that.”
Also, finding a fellow songwriter – even if he was interested in nu-metal opposed to pop “with a little bit of rock” – was like finding a fellow traveller, Balanko says.
“We were both writing music and so excited about it,” he says.
They liked the idea of recording their friends, finding talent at open mic nights, but they weren’t sure it could work.
“Record labels in general across the globe aren’t making all that much money compared to what they used to be,” Sturgess explains.
However, the duo eventually devised an unusual business model.
Imagine crossing the Detroit River, hooking a turn on West Grand Boulevard, parking in front of Hitsville, U.S.A., and maybe squeezing past Stevie Wonder on your way to a piano lesson with Berry Gordy.
That is essentially the Four Destinations model, thanks to the fact Sturgess and Alex are both pretty good guitar teachers.
“What if we developed a business plan that was completely grounded in music lessons, so the bills would be paid with teaching, and everything else we did was on top?” Sturgess asks.
Now they have a brand, a band, and a lifetime of insights to come.
