"Night at the Cooler" is the 2nd single from the upcoming album "Short Stories", to be released 10/31/2021.

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.”


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


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

Iain Key, Louder Than War


"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