L.T. Leif
Glasgow-based Canadian slow-felt swamp rock singer-songwriter L.T. Leif shares new single Pass Back Through the second single taken from forthcoming album Come Back To Me, But Lightly due Jan 27 via OK Pal Records & Lost Map Records.
Photography Credit: Craig M. Stewart
Discussing the latest single Leif comments: “This is a song about the cyclical nature of healing, the hard, long work of it. It is mostly about the harm we inflict on ourselves, by holding the sharp edge that is LIFE too close and tightly. It is about addiction, to whatever it is we engage with that hurts and stimulates, and the hard long slog that is dealing with, caring for, and recovering from these internal battles. I don’t believe in easy closure, but I do believe in finding ways through, again and again, however we are able.”
The second track to be released from forthcoming album Come Back To Me, But Lightly following previous single No Birds, with Leif commenting on that track: “Some of the hardest and most valuable work to be done under capitalism is in wanting what you want to want. This song is a treatise towards the shimmery possibilities we feel in there from time to time, when they are different from what’s been handed down to us. The dual realities of what is already, overlaid by what is desired instead, glimmering! The flashlight of desire”.
Commenting on Come Back To Me, But Lightly, L.T. Leif comments: The title is about the sun in the North, specifically the tension and suspended, cyclical, time of the sun as it begins to return after the peak of winter. It’s also about the body, loss as a decision, and knowing your own desire as a radical act. It has a lot of imagery and thought from the Northern places I’ve been living, and takes inspiration from minimalist writers, painters, and thinkers. This album comes from a six-year long space of change, from a life I was living as someone afraid of my own brain and body, into someone a lot more openly unshiney. Painful and seeping. Distance and decisions and loss and conflict are all things that can birth you into a different kind of being. I think that’s in large part the tension that underlies CBTMBL, alongside this hopeful, cyclical return to the difficult bits that matter. How commitment, whether to what you love or to what you need to heal from, can be expressed through return. That this is what a life can be built of”.
Demoed in a room on Glasgow’s Great Western Road and built intercontinentally with contributions both remote and in-person from friends including Clea Anaïs, Bill Wells, Matt Swann, eagleowl’s Clarissa Cheong and Bart Owl, Faith Eliott and Mark Hamilton (Woodpigeon), Leif comments: “I really love collaborating, and it was an ultimate dream team, in part due to the weirdness that was lockdown. I had a collection of tracks I’d started in Canada at Child Stone Studio with Chris Dadge, working with my bud Jennifer Crighton as a collabo-producer. I had just moved to Scotland when funding came through to turn it all into a full album. I made demos in my room on Great Western Road, and used those as a baseline to build the album intercontinentally. I sent away for parts from people who I loved back in Canada, and to ones I had a good feeling about being new-true-blues here in Scotland. I am not prescriptive as a producer, I much prefer to pick people for the goodness of our relationship and then to let them find their own way in. They included Clea Anaïs, Jacqueline Bell, Clarissa Cheong, Jennifer Crighton, Chris Dadge, Robyn Dawson, Faith Eliott, Morgan Greenwood, Mark Hamilton, J.J. Mayo, Louise McGraw, Bart Owl, Matt Swann, Dallin Ursenbach, Nate Waters, and Bill Wells. I spent months editing down the parts and arranging it all. Concurrently, I worked with Ben Seal in their studio in Fife, where we cleaned everything up and filled out the tracks. They taught me a lot about the tools of the slickness of pop. I still had those tracks from Child Stone, and a couple made with friend Morgan Greenwood. To tie everything together, Graeme Young at Chamber Studios came on to mix the album. Graeme helped get everything to live in the same universe. There are a couple of songs on there that I made”.
