"'Neil the Dancing Girl' has a lovely, angular, 'Sonic Youth At Disneyland' style feel to it"
@norock

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.”