"Musically, Short Stories is something of a pick-and-mix assortment of the great and good of alternative music’s past, whether referencing her noise-rock roots on Night at the Cooler, through to country-tinged joys of Competitive Clara and the glamorous-indie of Neil The Dancing Girl, there’s even room for an excellent cover of Robert Palmer’s Johnny and Mary."

"Leah highlights a slightly surprising trio of songwriters as the key influences on the record, Elliot Smith and Daniel Johnston, so-far-so-indie, and the curveball, Biggie Smalls, Leah noting, 'if I can paint half as vivid a picture on these Short Stories as he did with his songs, I’ve done my job'. A reminder that you’ve never been away so long that you can’t come back, Leah Callahan is proof that great songwriting knows no era or age, it’s just great songwriting, and these short stories are musical tales you won’t want to miss."

fortherabbits.net/2021/10/21/get-to-know-leah-callahan/

"In Short Stories you can definitely hear (Leah's) confidence growing... Short Stories, like Simple Folk, is indebted to indie-pop. It has so many songs which could easily grace an an American teen movie (if there is a new John Hughes out there they need to be listening.) Listening on this side of the Atlantic it completely fits with what I could imagine as being played in Trax (Pretty In Pink) or on US College Radio alongside the likes The Smiths, Echo and The Bunnymen, New Order and Tears For Fears."

"My favourite track on the album is Party. I’m sure everyone knew of a house (or knows of one) where there constantly seemed/seems to be something happening. Remember the days before the real world and responsibilities kicked in? The track reminds me of a grown up/adult version of the theme from (Here Come the) Double Deckers but performed by Sonic Youth."
Iain Key, Louder Than War

louderthanwar.com/leah-callahan-short-stories-album-review/

“Short Stories follows the same blueprint (as Simple Folk) - carefully crafted college rock songs - albeit digging a little deeper lyrically. She tries to make to sense of female animosity (Competitive Clara) and looks back on a relationship that went South (Tom and the Dog)…Callahan offers honest snapshots from her life and her surroundings. The album's sole cover, Robert Palmer's Johnny and Mary, fits in perfectly. With Alex Stern and Alex Brander having her back again she has found her niche.”
Hans Werkman, Here Comes the Flood

www.herecomestheflood.com/2021/11/leah-callahan-short-stories.html


"Neil the Dancing Girl (has a) lovely, angular, 'Sonic Youth At Disneyland' style feel to it"
No Rock and Roll Fun


The Story of Short Stories:

With her hiatus from music in the rearview mirror, Boston based songwriter Leah Callahan (Turkish Delight, Betwixt, The Glass Set) shows no signs of slowing down with her second full-length release in seven months. On this, her third solo album, entitled Short Stories, Callahan brings you into her mad world of outsiders, misfits and iconoclasts, including: fortune teller roommates (“Dawn and a Bottle of Wine”), fairy godmother bookstore owners (“Lady of the Lake”), intrusive oddball neighbors (“Tom and the Dog”), and hot mess bffs (“Neil the Dancing Girl”). Low paying jobs fill the daytime hours (“Spirit Haus”), while frenzied nights bring misadventures with indie celebrity (“Competitive Clara”, “Night at the Cooler”) and arty all night bachanals (“Party”). To round out these Stories, Callahan reverently covers Robert Palmer’s classic tale of jaded bourgeois - “Johnny and Mary”.

Although you’ll hear an homage to Callahan’s Noise rock past in the song “Night at the Cooler”, most of the album is firmly planted in indie pop territory. From the Gallic disco of Daft Punk (“Neil the Dancing Girl”) to Heart Like A Wheel era Linda Rondstadt (“Competitive Clara”) Short Stories is as indebted to AM radio as it is to college radio; indeed Lindsey Buckingham, The Pretenders, Joe Jackson, Sebadoh, T.Rex, and Of Montreal are all cited by multi-instrumentalist/arranger Alex Stern (The Sterns, Big D and the Kids Table, The Inevitables) as influences for the album’s sound. Once again Callahan has enlisted the team of producer/engineer Richard Marr (Midnight Creeps, Pile, Toxic Narcotic) with his in-house session musicians Stern and percussionist Alex Brander (Big D and the Kids Table, The Feel Goods).

Channeling some of the 20th century’s most respected musical storytellers for inspiration on how to best tell these Short Stories, Callahan describes her process: “I immersed myself in the music of a handful of songwriters in the months leading up to writing these songs, in particular these three: Elliot Smith, Daniel Johnston and Biggie Smalls. I wanted to challenge myself to write songs that were both subtle yet complex, so I researched Elliott Smith, analyzing ideas I found on YouTube and Reddit to uncover how he used progressions and chords. I also looked to Daniel Johnston, a writer once described as ‘incapable of artifice’ and tried to emulate his unstudied, raw lyrical approach when it seemed right for the story.”

“I was also inspired by several classic hip hop poets, in particular Biggie Smalls. Take these words from his song ‘Juicy’: ‘We used to fuss when the landlord dissed us. No heat, wonder why Christmas missed us’. It paints a picture of a childhood scarred by poverty in just three words - ‘Christmas missed us’. If I can paint half as vivid a picture on these Short Stories as he did with his songs, I’ve done my job.”

Read the October 2021 Bandcamp article mentioning 2 of Leah's bands as seminal in the Boston indie rock scene: daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/nineties-indie-rock-boston-list



Reviews from Callahan’s March 2021 Release “Simple Folk”

“(Simple Folk is) a collection of slinky, narrative driven guitar-pop songs built around hooks... (it) feels like an album's album in an age where albums are not very much in style."

"Callahan calls back to a different era of musical consumption, linking a distinct narrative through each track's lyrical layover. The daydream affection ranges from the blatant, like on '1997 Again' a romancing of the '90s Boston Rock scene, to the aurally suggestive, as in standouts 'A Woman of Few Things' and 'I Don't Relate', which raise a glass to late-20th century indie."

"It all adds up to an album we'd all once upon a time be excited to grab off the shelf at Newbury Comics, and plop down on the counter in front of a dutifully impressed cashier."

Michael Marotta, Vanyaland
vanyaland.com/2021/03/22/leah-callahan-discovers-her-teenage-dream-on-new-album-simple-folk/


"A really strong set of well crafted songs that definitely rewards repeated listening."

Iain Key, Louder Than War
louderthanwar.com/leah-callahan-simple-folk-album-review-interview/

"Simple Folk is neither ‘simple’ nor ‘folk’, by and large, but the several meanings of its title reflects a complexity that has been redolent throughout Leah Callahan’s career."

"You may know Leah Callahan as the lead singer of Bostonian art-rockers Turkish Delight whose albums were re-released in 2019 by UK label, Reckless Yes; or from the post-punk act Betwixt; or even shoegazers The Glass Set. But now she has shared her first solo album since 2003’s Even Sleepers, Simple Folk. Whereas Even Sleepers was a bossa-nova slice of late night acoustic, Simple takes Leah back to the beginning. Full of big instrumentation and confessional lyrics, it’s nine songs ‘tackle over-consumption, environmental ruin and elitism’ as well as recount Leah’s ‘myriad fears and personal failures’, and takes its musical cue from the British pop of her childhood in the ’80s."

John McGovern, Get in Her Ears
getinherears.com/2021/02/23/premiere-leah-callahan-smell/


********************************************************************************
More about Short Stories, by Leah Callahan:



“If you have seen any of the lovely articles people wrote about Simple Folk, or the podcasts done by a few kind podcasters that invited me, you may have heard that whole story about my reawakening as an artist around the time Turkish Delight did our reunion and Custom Made Music released a collection of live songs and demos, and The Reckless Yes and I Heart Noise labels did reissues of Turkish Delight between 2017 and 2019."

“Feeling validated as an artist for the first time in many years, and literally feeling like keeping up that creative vibe I was using to rehearse for The Turks - I started working on a book. Writing this book had another motivation, I wanted to write about my best friend who fell ill with cancer and was given a year to live, and have it be ready for her to read before she passed away. She passed in a much shorter time than doctors predicted, and my finished book didn’t get a good reception from the handful of well-read people I shared it with - so I trashed that idea.”

“But I still had this energy, and I used it to create several songs, which took about 2 years to get out there. That was my March 2021 album Simple Folk. Then a huge creative spurt happened as I was getting those songs recorded in fall of 2020, which was no doubt related to my happiness in finding a great collaborator, and I wrote 9 more songs.”

“This time, it was different. I didn’t have 13 years of pain and bitterness pouring out of me, but instead, there was a lot of joy, and maybe even relief. There was still a great deal of reflection, these songs too came out of that book I never published, but this reflection wasn’t about me, it was about the interesting people I came across over the years, primarily those I met when I was actively a musician and an artist, and primarily living and hanging out with artistic and what society sometimes might call eccentrics or bohemians.”

“Another difference was the way I wrote these songs on Short Stories. Although on one hand they did pour out of me, they were very consciously written with a purpose, a purpose to tell the story of each person like a slice of life, so the listener could get a few moments of my time spent with them, and hopefully see the impact these people had on me, in some cases, an impact I only realized many years later.”

“I was thinking about these songs and it struck me how much this album is dominated by women, and being female, so much that maybe I could have called the album something to do with that - but the name of the album was planned before I sat down and looked at it as a whole and realized what it was about. That was never intentional to focus on women or gender, the only thing that was intentional was my idea to grow as a songwriter, to focus on telling stories, as opposed to writing stuff that came into my head (which often ends up being about myself or my own thoughts.) I can never get into other peoples’ heads, but I tried to at the very least paint a picture of their activities in my life, the impressions they had on me, and how these impressions are with me many years later.”

“The 1st song on the album, ‘Neil the Dancing Girl’, it’s about my friendship with a gay man but it’s so much more than that, it’s about my affinity with him and other gay men - I had a lot of gay male friends in my 20s. Why we decided to be friends with each other has many layers - for me there was safety - I rarely worried about sexuality coming into play. For some of my gay male friends, I know they said they didn’t fit in to the norms of what being gay meant at the time - the pressures of having to look or act a certain way - and so we were misfit toys together. Maybe they wanted someone ‘safe’ too, someone they didn’t have to worry about being sexual with, but still have intimacy and closeness with someone. And maybe it goes even deeper than all that, I identified more with men than with women in some ways, especially during those years of my life. The relationships with them allowed me to not worry about fitting into any sort of traditional female role or activity and gave me freedom to experiment with how I would eventually carry myself and come into personhood.”

“’Competitive Clara’” and ‘Night at the Cooler’ are about some very complex relationships with women. I say ‘I never understood female competition’ and I mean it, I thought humans were above some sort of animal competition for mates or property, but time and time again I met people who either wanted to take my partner - or were very concerned about me taking theirs. I think of my Clara of a modern day Jolene with a STEM spin (I use language I literally took off the pages of science articles online about 'Sexual selection') - instead of singing to Jolene begging her not to take my man - I sing to Clara basically ‘go ahead and take him, you two deserve each other if this is the kind of stupid behavior you feel comfortable exhibiting’.”

“’Night’ I think shows the complexities of being a female musician in the 1990s, yes there were some wonderful times, but there were a lot of asshole males being threatened who liked to call women sluts, for example, for no apparent reason other than to make them feel bad. My outfit for that show in the song, by the way, although it shouldn’t matter, was a knee length, high collar 50s blue velvet dress. It was very Doris Day, so if that is slutty in 1995 or whatever, that man did not get out much. I also think it’s fun that I talk about making a pie for a band that let my band open; I think it was out of character for that scene - you didn’t see a lot of cool looking indie rock chicks running around holding pumpkin pies - but it was just the way I wanted to express myself and show gratitude. I think people found my innocence and lack of pretense - which of course you see the way Turkish Delight are written about is very similar - a bit unusual. It was small but significant. I didn’t really know any other way to be. “

“The 6th song on the album (or the 1st on side B if this were vinyl) is called ‘Lady of the Lake’. As I mentioned, I wanted that book I never published to be somewhat about, and definitely dedicated, to my good friend who passed away in 2019. The language is very simple, but heartfelt. ‘She was the Lady of the Lake, She was the bus that you didn’t take’; a friendship, for someone who is troubled mentally, can be very grounding. I literally stopped running around, taking a bus or a train to somewhere where I might just get into some sort of trouble, I cut back on drinking, I calmed down quite a bit when I met this friend. ‘She was so young, she was so old’ the mythical Lady of the Lake is a sort of Fairy Godmother, you don’t really think of her as any one sort of person, but she has the best of all human qualities - the excitement and free spiritedness of youth, the wisdom of age.”

“The song immediately after, ’Dawn and a Bottle of Wine’, I referred earlier to people who shape you in your life but at the time you don’t quite appreciate. I think most of us have them, that person you don’t seek to befriend, but circumstances put you in their lives, then when suddenly they are no longer there, you realize how important they are. My roommate in the mid 90s had a sage quality, meaning she would speak in this very fortune teller mode, which included reading my palm one night. She would drink a bottle or so of wine every Saturday, combine that with my own buzz after getting home from going out somewhere, or playing a show, and our conversations were probably pretty off the wall. Dawn had this huge collection of 45 inch singles, most I would say from the 60s. I tongue in cheek say ‘ripe old age of 39’: because at the time, I thought 39 year olds must be very smart with loads of amazing life experience. Each single had a story, about the artist, about the song. I don’t remember any of those but I remember our conversations; a lot of times I would be sad, and she would say kind things to me. One night she read my palm; she looked as if she’d seen a ghost - it was quite dramatic - but she also told me I had the world ‘In the Palm of my hands’. This inspired the last song on my album, the hopeful - somewhere over the rainbow-like - 'Palm of your hands'. 'Palm' is indeed hopeful, but sung from the perspective of someone who has been around the block a few times, thinks hope is a joke, but holds onto it anyway. If you see my press release, I speak about being influenced by 3 songwriters, here there is a strong influence from Daniel Johnston and his matter of fact brilliance.”

“’Tom and the Dog’ while not a song about other women, it’s about my experience as a young woman. It’s a very short story, about a feeling, an incident. Discomfort around older men. Recently I saw a TikTok video, about a young woman being approached by an older man and her discomfort. In my story, the man (or men) certainly don’t mean any harm (as the one with her did). But there’s a lack of respect for female space, and there’s no real language available for the 20 something year old me to express that, so I just feel uncomfortable, and things get more awkward and weird because of it.”

“My cover of the song ‘Johnny and Mary’, I don’t change the lyrics, but I think it’s interesting as a woman singing that, will people hear the story Robert Palmer was telling differently because a woman is singing it? I don’t relate much to the lives of the people in the song, but at the same time I think there’s a real universality to it, a universality I hope people will hear in my songs like ‘Neil the Dancing Girl’. Everyone has a Neil, they could be any gender, any sexual orientation, just someone who is a big part of your life, that finishes your sentences, makes you feel not alone in the world, makes every occasion more fun.”

“’Spirit Haus’ and ‘Party’ are probably the only songs not about gender; 'Haus' is about a job I had and peoples’ reactions to it, and ‘Party’ is about the Parties I had in my 20s that were a big part of my life. I do see my lyrics in ‘Party’ as a sort of anti-ageist activism; I feel like as women we try so hard to lie about our ages, or skirt the issue, or somehow feel ashamed of being old. I show pride in my age in Party; us kids born in the 70s had a damn good time, it was a heck of a lot cheaper to live in Allston/Boston, and we made full use of that with our art and our lives. It’s a fun song, but still very meaningful to me.”