Musician and recording engineer Steve Leaf has spent 2021 working on a solo LP entitled Twelve Songs. The tracks were self-recorded at his home studio in Michigan and released in batches of three via Bandcamp between February and May of this year. This month Leaf compiled the songs into a digital album release out now on the platform. Leaf explains that when COVID quarantine brought an end to touring and his work as a recording engineer, he built out his home studio. He offers:
“I roll with a microphone, a synth, a drum machine, and my guitar. It’s not Sound City by any means, but it keeps me productive and humbled.”
Once the studio was outfitted, Leaf decided to take on the challenge of writing, recording, mixing, and mastering new tracks in short order while following a proactive release schedule on Bandcamp as a means of saying “thank you” to the group of fans he had collected there. While he concedes that the project was quite a challenge, it pushed him to develop his songwriting skills quickly, not to mention the technical tasks of mixing and mastering.
Steve recently took time to answer questions about his 2021 project and album release, while also looking forward to what else this year has in store musically for him. Below, you can listen to Twelve Songs and read a transcript of our email interview.
LETV: How long have you been a recording artist?
SL: Well, I guess technically I put out a record with a high school band back in 2003, so seventeen years, but that was mainly cover songs that we really had no business covering. That said, I put out my first album in earnest in 2010, so I’d say I’ve been giving it a proper go for just over a decade.
LETV: What influences you the most musically? A lot of your music sounds like it’s referenced from the early/mid-2000s at the height of indie/electro-pop (from the drum and synth choices to your vocals at times.)
SL: That’s a good question. I’m 36, so I think a lot of the music from my formative years was hitting me right around then, the mid-2000s. Not that I don’t consume new music, I do, pretty voraciously actually, but you’re right. The influences from that era are apparent. I can’t really pin down exactly what influenced those sonic choices, so I’ll give you some of my favorite records from that timeframe:
Room on Fire by The Strokes
Classics by Ratatat
The Reminder by Feist
In Rainbows by Radiohead
The Crane Wife by The Decemberists
LETV: What was the inspiration behind releasing several songs a month this year and then compiling them here as the full “Twelve Songs” LP?
SL: I know I’m not necessarily reinventing the wheel, but I did want to try something new. I’d always see bands release singles sometimes a year in advance of an album release, so I thought, ‘wait, what If I just low key release the whole thing in stages and then give it a proper release when it’s all done. Keeping people’s attention is hard enough, so I thought I’ll just put out the songs. Don’t talk about it. Just do it. The catalyst was actually Bandcamp. I had been building a small fanbase there, and I wanted to release the material three songs at a time only on Bandcamp as a kind of ‘thank you’ to those supporting me on that platform. That platform is so immediate too. You can just upload tracks, and supporters can purchase them right then and there. It’s so direct.
LETV: There are some moments that really stuck out as the album progressed; “Real Housewives” is a little darker and more mysterious than the rest of the record, “Lover’s Ghost” has some awesome sounding guitar riffs, and the saxophone on “Midwest Nice” is incredible. When you set to record these tracks, did you have an idea of how they would all work together, or is each meant to be a vignette on its own?
SL: Yes and no. I knew I wanted the songs to work together sonically, but not necessarily lyrically. I’m admittedly not very good at developing an entire story arc over an album. Maybe that’ll be the next record I tackle. But for this, it was really a challenge for me to try and write, perform, record, and mix everything solo. That was important to me. Not out of arrogance, but just to try and do it. A lot of the melodies from those songs you referenced were filed away months in advance and kept in my little melody library. The keyboard part for ‘Real Housewives’ was written at my partner’s parent’s place in Illinois when I was messing around on her brother’s old Casio. I kept playing it until the family sternly told me to stop, so I busted out my phone and put the melody there. The chords for ‘Lover’s Ghost’ were made for what I thought was going to be an instrumental track, but I started singing over it, and it worked. Lastly, the sax on ‘Midwest Nice’ was a favor I called in from my friend and longtime collaborator, Patrick Booth. I wrote the guitar solo and thought, this needs to be doubled with sax. It will sound way better. So that’s the long answer, although I don’t really know if I even answered the question.
LETV: Are you going to continue to release music monthly? What should we expect from you going forward?
SL: I’m not sure if I’ll continue to release music monthly anytime soon. It is on the docket for later this year, but I am taking a break from recording to play some live shows this summer and push this record. But moving forward, I’ll be making moves with my solo instrumental project, Sunken Melody, and hoping to record with the leviathan of a band I play with, Public Access. For now, though, I’ll be roaming around the midwest with my drum machine playing songs off of this new album.
