 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
Leyna Noel-22-year-old singer of "art-songs"-is a recovering Jersey Girl who earns her keep in Oakland, California, selling apples. She performs regularly in the East Bay and in San Francisco, and this year debuted in New York City; a couple of songs at the open mic at Caffe Vivaldi in the West Village her first night in town prompted an invitation to play a full set the following Tuesday. For Noel, home is a patchwork of landscapes. Born in Great Neck, she left New York when she was still a baby for the wilds of north and then south Jersey. There she gathered memories in a house on a hill, a blueberry farm, an off-highway Hilton; a year in a motor home traveling to her father's car races; a few summers with Great Aunt Jo in Georgia making 1-2-3 cakes in the afternoons.... Things multifarious seem to be things familiar to her. It is so with Leyna Noel's songs, parented as they are by the triad of instruments at her fingertips. The piano became her sweetheart at the age of seven-she played the pots and pans before that-guitar at thirteen; a dear friend brought her a cello for her twentieth birthday. A writer girl with a Sleater-Kinney heart, as a teenager Noel channeled her music-making impulse into writing poems and a zine called Moon Swings. Her songs retain a literary flavor; only now the musician in her seeks the essence that provokes the song. And verbalizes it. Leyna Noel collects dictionaries-to cultivate specificity in her lyrics, to ruminate. San Francisco summoned Noel to study writing, but the 200 pianos of Mills College in Oakland had something else in mind. Everywhere she went-basement, parlor, even laundry room-sat a different piano, each in a differing state of (dis)repair. She began a project recording each piano, composing to the idiosyncrasies of each. She began to sing words to the melodies her fingers found. Calling herself the "Hyacinth Girl" (from T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland), she started making recordings and playing shows in 2002. Her debut full-length, The Honest Voluptuary (2004), bears her first and middle names, Leyna Noel. A boon opening for Mirah at Bottom of the Hill in December 2004 started her on a roll. This summer Leyna Noel will participate in the 2005 Mission Creek Music festival in San Francisco, craft a new recording, and tour. She will also spend her third summer teaching at Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls in Portland, exchanging inspiration with girls between the ages of eight and eighteen Song by song, Leyna Noel mourns the smallness of family, the distance and death that keeps her dusty matriarchs and patriarchs away. Her music is the cleanest way for her to find the lost and hold the far away. The solace she finds in singing, so do her audiences in listening. Following an April performance, one woman responded with a single word: incantatory. Check out the artist's website: http://www.thehonestvoluptuary.com Track List: 1. Orphantine 2. Cling Peaches 3. Pinafore 4. Matchseller 5. 7:45 am / Bluesong / Southpaw 6. So Shines a Good Deed in a Weary Girl 7. Caroline Tells Me 8. The Honest Voluptuary 9. So Stand Still 10. Exigency 11. Lock of Your Hair 12. Solving It Suggested CDs:Other Genres:
|