Leslie Stevens has a perfect voice to sing country-music, even though she looks like a blonder Edie Brickell, she sings with a Dolly Parton bird-like kind of voice. Leslie was headlining the Grand Ole Echo with her band on Sunday night, and she was totally charming the public, and it didn’t spoil anything that, with her cascading curly blonde hair, she was as cute as a witty Disney princess. A few years ago she was playing under the moniker Leslie and the Badgers, but this time she was only announced under her own name however still backed up by a full band.
Country is a genre so beaten down, so played and overplayed that it takes a lot to keep me interested,… these days so many Nashville singers have invaded the airwaves and pretend to play this new country type of thing, but with their calculated twang in the voice, I often find that none of them has enough personality to be distinguished from the next one. This could not have been further from the truth for Leslie Stevens, she was bringing something fresh to the game, and managed to captivate the audience with her adorable personality, her uplifting and ascending tunes and her high-pitched voice dolling up over the pedal steel and layered guitars.
She seemed to sing her heart out at each song, reaching some powerful level in a playful way, and was all-smile almost all the time. Most of the songs were bright and fun, sometimes turning into quieter ballads, bringing a touch of sorrow and a fragile yearning, but there was always her soothing voice, which has even been compared to Patsy Cline’s. Impregnated with gospel-like vibe and some genuine soul, the songs seemed to come straight from another time, although there was nothing nostalgic about them. Some of them could even touch very dark subjects like ‘Falling in a deep dark hole’, the ‘metaphysical side of their set’ as she said with a smile, but the whole thing was executed with such charm and good humor, there was nothing dark about it. She made people sing along during ‘It’s okay to trip’ which goes like ‘It’s okay to trip but don’t fall, it’s okay to fall but don’t hurt yourself, It’s okay to hurt yourself but don’t hurt anybody else, It’s okay to hurt somebody else, but just say you are sorry’… and the song — which was supposed to appear on the soundtrack of the upcoming film ‘Lost in Austin’… too bad for us — was all about sweetness and fun.
Leslie Stevens has toured with Rhett Miller, Laura Veirs, opened for Loudon Wainwright III, has sung harmonies with She & Him and J. Tillman, and she seems to have been absent from the scene for a little while. However she is back with a forthcoming album, ‘Tough’, produced by Jonathan Wilson (Father John Misty, Bonnie Prince Billy, Dawes) who also played on Conor Oberst’s new album Upside Down Mountain. If she has said to have been mostly influenced by storytellers like Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen, Leslie comes from the LA punk scene (she started in the band Zeitgeist Auto Parts), but as many other did before, she decided to put a bit of alt-country in her emotional songs, and I am sure nobody will complain.
