The House I Grew Up In
And the Music That Built It
In 2007 I self-released my first album Her Smile by my piano-led band Leo & The Mane. It was a collection of songs I had written since learning to play the piano. A mishmash of 60s influenced pop and 90s rock, and was made with the small inheritance I received from my father’s passing.
Upon release it was met with screaming apathy by the limited audience available in the pre-streaming and social media era, and the band fell apart immediately after. Consequently, I filed it under ‘first attempts’ and left it to languish in the pitch black archives of the internet. So why, after a further six solo albums, have I returned to Leo & The Mane for these latest songs? And what do we have to say this time?
Ever since the first album I had wanted to make a follow up but the group had disbanded and not long afterwards the guitarist and the drummer moved to London, I moved to Manchester and the bassist moved to New Zealand. I also didn’t want a second album to be of an inferior technical quality. All but one of my solo albums have been made by myself at home and I have had to learn how to record, produce, mix and master alone, resulting in varying degrees of success. Her Smile was recorded in a professional studio in Kent, with an experienced engineer, and was mastered professionally. A follow up would have to maintain that quality, and that quality isn’t cheap (more on that later). All of this meant it was simpler, and more affordable, to make albums myself. But after 15 years and six albums I was bored of “playing with myself”. I have been in other people’s bands over the years and even tried to cobble together another of my own, but these projects all fizzled. So the idea for a second Leo & The Mane album stayed on the shelf. And then, an old friend got in touch to tell me about a health scare.
Alex Powley is one of my best friends and the bassist for Leo & The Mane. We went to secondary/high school together and played in bands together for many years. We have very different music tastes though. Alex loves late 80s and early 90s Grunge, Prog Rock and Fusion music. I, it has to be said, do not. However, when playing together this contrast made for a really exciting dynamic. Powley essentially plays ‘Lead Bass’ which sat well with my bass heavy piano-style, meaning in The Mane we could alternate. We always had fun playing and I’ve missed it. So when he got in touch to tell me about his health scare, I was keen to stay in touch. I stayed informed of how he was and it was great to reconnect.
During his convalescence I decided to finally put that second Leo & The Mane album together, both because I’d always wanted to, and because Powley was, to be honest, the other half of that band, so it felt like a good way to stay in touch.
I went back over old song books and lyric sheets and dug up a handful of songs that reflected where I was at that moment and wrote a few new ones too. I gave the old ones a brush up and then set about looking for a studio, as Big Squeak (where the original had been recorded) closed some years ago. While searching the internet, I found Big Jelly, which had a large live room and a grand piano, the two things I was after. It was also only a 20-minute train journey from where I lived in Kent at the time. It was perfect! I booked the studio for three days in August and set about preparing. But Powley and I were one short. We needed a drummer.
My brother came to the rescue by suggesting Toby Evangelou, a drummer he worked with. I contacted Toby and he was very keen, and, as luck would have it, also worked at Big Jelly part time. So after a rehearsal or two, and a few demos to send to Alex, we were ready to go into the studio. Unfortunately, Alex was in the midst of a host of his own life changes and I couldn’t afford to fly him over, so his contributions were remote but he sent them almost immediately after the initial recording sessions. I also wanted to take time over my vocals, so I recorded them at home.
Once everything was put together, I met back up with Mike Collins, the engineer at Big Jelly, and we mixed the album in January of this year. It was then sent to John Winfield for mastering and the album was done! Or the music was at least.
I wanted to actually SELL this album. Previous solo efforts were scrappy DIY affairs that I could pump out onto streaming with barely an announcement, given that real marketing from major labels costs millions. I can’t compete with that, but wanted to do something. I had three singles I wanted to release and needed the promotional material to go with it. So I took the photos, prepared the social posts, and shot three music videos. I set out a marketing calendar to a release date and got to work. I had also hired an artist I was a fan of to make the album cover art as soon as the recording sessions were finished. For once I felt like I could get some momentum.
Unfortunately, the artist I hired took nearly a year to ultimately produce nothing, so I had to change the release schedule, which left my marketing calendar in the dust. I fired the artist and got a refund and I still posted everything I could, where I could, but have not been able to get or sustain the momentum I had hoped for. This also meant I had to come up with my own album art at the last minute, for which I asked my Uncle Steve, the original artist for the Her Smile cover, to make some more calligraphy for the new album title. The photo collage I made for the cover is a tip-of-the-hat to Paul Weller’s Stanley Road and is a montage of various images from my childhood and the past of myself, Alex and Leo & The Mane. It’s not perfect but I rather like it.
So that’s how the album got made, and it’s out now! Below is a break down and explanation of all the songs but if you take nothing else from this, I hope you realise how important an album it is to me, and the hard work that went into it from everyone.
As a side note for Spotify CEO, Daniel Ek (who said the cost of making music is “close to zero”), this album didn’t just cost time and effort, it was expensive. From the cost of studio time, to mixing and mastering, paying Toby his session fee, art budget, transport, food, etc this album has cost me around £3,000 to finish and release. And that was out of my own pocket. I don’t have a label, and I don’t have a rich family to cover the cost for me. The reason I could afford to make this album, was that I had been saving money to migrate to the USA to finally be with my wife. This was delayed due to COVID and the world ending, so I wanted to take the opportunity to do something for myself and my (at the time) ill friend, so that I could look back on something fondly at a bad time, like I did with the first album. This was not all paid at once and was spread over a year while I had a day job, but this was not paid for by anyone else, and I did not take out a loan.
So no, Daniel, this was not a ‘zero cost’ endeavour. I will never make the money I spent on this back, in large part thanks to Spotify’s appalling policies on paying artists which might make the cost of listening to music “close to zero”, but not making it. Music has been devalued by the likes of Spotify, which means I will never make my money back on this album, especially as I cannot afford the extra it would cost to produce hard copies.
I knew this was the case and did it anyway because I wanted to, but that doesn’t make the frankly disgusting way art has been devalued any less bitter, or explaining that I basically flushed all that money down the drain to my wife. But I made an album I am proud of with my friends and that, in itself, is invaluable. My father self-funded the making of his own albums, and I grew up in a music scene that was all about the DIY ethic, hence why this is my EIGHTH album. I’d love it if you bought a copy, but I’d rather ask you to just enjoy listening to it.
In short, I made this album for the love of music, the love of my friend and for the love of all the people and things I wrote these songs about. And THAT is The House I Grew Up In. I hope you enjoy listening to it.
The Songs:
Brand
Brand is about the contemporary demands of social media that insists we must all cultivate our own personal brands online. We aren’t people anymore, we’re commodities. It sucks and I think we all hate it but for some reason we all have to keep doing it. I took this concept back to the original meaning of ‘Branding’, which was when farmers took red hot metal prods, shaped into the logo of their farm, and seared that logo into the flesh of an animal. Musically, it’s inspired by Carole King’s I Feel the Earth Move and The Beatle’s Drive My Car. It also features my good friend Joel’s guest appearance as chief hand clapper.
The House I Grew Up In
The title track was actually written on guitar and was inspired by a photograph (featured on the cover) of the coast in the town where I grew up. I combined the imagery of the seaside with memories of childhood and this was the result. It features a duel solo between myself and Alex. The song seemed to encapsulate everything the album was about, so I made it the title.
Make Me
This is the first oldie, written a year or two after the first album came out. It’s what I think of as a ‘young Leo’ song, given that it’s an angry and angsty song about a girl who broke my heart. It’s that angry, entitled feeling that I used to get when I was rejected. I’ve grown out of that, thankfully, but it was always a potent feeling and produced some great lyrics. I didn’t remember all of the original music when I dug it out, so I had to rewrite it a bit, based on the melody. I told Toby to play the drum beat from Grinderman’s song Set Me Free. And he did. It also features the studio’s Rhodes keyboard that I felt I just HAD to use.
Follow Me
One of the oldest songs on the album. Written in 2004, I wrote it about the puzzling way people listen to celebrities and supposed leaders based on nothing but charisma. If only I knew… This was nearly two decades before the term ‘Influencer’ was word of the year, and when ‘Following’ someone meant you were a spy or a criminal. I wanted it to sound like an old soul/RnB track but it doesn’t have that wall of sound those old songs used to, given that it’s just three instruments. It’s a silly song but I’m of the opinion music has started taking itself far too seriously in recent years. I like a bit of playfulness.
Mary
Another oldie from around the same time as Follow Me, the lyrics were re-written to be slightly less pretentious (though they are still pretentious). It’s about an imaginary woman and how men tend create a lot of the women they desire in their own heads. This was take two (like a lot of the takes on this album) and was just me and Mike, our engineer, in the studio, giving it an appropriate, solitary feeling.
Confabulation
A ‘confabulation’ is an imagined, fictional memory. I wanted to write something like Iron & Wine’s stream of consciousness-type lyrics and this was the result. I wrote the lyrics while living in Manchester and it didn’t have music for years. It isn’t about anyone in particular but draws from memories and images about various people and places in my life. Toby added that awesome shuffle which changed the vibe and made it much more propulsive. I then asked my friend Guy to provide some strings to give it some more dynamics and the result was wonderful. All of the strings are him. I didn’t realise it when selecting it for the album but it contains the line “in the house where she grew up”.
I See the Light
My favourite track on the album. I wrote this specifically for this project and it came out even better than I had hoped. It’s inspired by all those 60s, psychedelic tracks I love that ask big, philosophical questions. People argue that pop music isn’t an appropriate medium for that kind of discussion, hence the decline in this kind of lyricism, but I’d argue popularising curiosity should be the main goal of culture. It features a blistering solo from Alex and, while they don’t sound like much, those backing vocals took FOREVER.
Their Solution
Another bit of fun. I wanted a fast track so I dug this one out. It’s a song about how I feel we are all treated growing up, that our creativity and critical thinking is beaten out of us, and that we are taught how to best obey and follow rules rather than question them. Set to a rock and roll beat. I’m not actually a fan of Elton John but I concede this is probably heavily influenced by his propulsive, early songwriting. The piano solo isn’t an overdub and you can hear Toby having a lot of fun on the tubs as the song goes on.
Be With Her
Originally titled ‘He’s with Her’ and written for the first album, this has stuck with me for years. Lyrically it’s about the homeless people who will stay on the Tube to keep warm in winter, and that lady whose husband was the announcer for “Mind the Gap” and she would take the tube just to hear his voice after he died. It’s also about the many, many journeys on the Piccadilly Line that my wife and I took to get her to and from the airport over the years. It’s short and sweet, and undeniably inspired by Ben Folds Five’s, Cigarette.
Skye’s Blue
This is a song that’s undergone many revisions over the years. It was written around the time of the first album and tells the story of a funny night with original Leo & The Mane drummer, Andy.
I was out in town with friends and I’d missed the last bus home so Andy offered his bed for the night. Not long after crashing, a lady friend woke Andy by knocking at his door and demanding a bed for the night, resulting in all three of us staying in the same room. While you may think this is the beginning of some X-rated night of passion, nothing actually happened. It’s just a funny anecdote purely by dint of it being so anti-climactic. The lyric “Christmas is coming and Skye’s rattling down the hall” is from Andy impatiently waiting for this second guest to bed down that night and yelling “so is Christmas” after she said she was ‘coming’ from the other end of the hall.
I changed the lyrics repeatedly trying to fit the whole anecdote in but not leaving it open to sexual interpretation. I don’t know how successful I was. But I’ve always loved the chorus, so it had to go on the album.
Fly
Another one intended for the first album. It’s about the fact I used to have dreams of flying. Those stopped after my Dad died. But the vivid memory of being able to fly has always stayed with me and I hope one day I’ll have another dream like that again. The piano part uses a pattern that is meant to mimic the flapping of a birds wings to further reinforce the sensation of flying. I love Alex’s playing on this track especially. It’s essentially a long solo for him, he manages to weave in and out of the piano playing and let it soar as the track develops.
Thanks To You
I owe my Mum a lot. She raised me, of course, but even as an adult she has been there to support me whenever I needed her. I was lucky enough to be able to live with her during the Pandemic and could repay some of that care when she was struck with Cancer in the midst of Covid. Twice. She survived it all and is still alive and kicking, bless her. She’s done so much for so many people and doesn’t get enough credit so the least I could offer her is a song. Now that I live thousands of miles away from her, this song carries even more weight.
I don’t often like to toot my own horn but we nailed the recording of this one. Every aspect of the song is just right. Toby’s drumming is sparse but with a lovely swing, Powley’s melodic playing is perfect as it shadows my piano lines, I got the touch of the piano just right, I didn’t oversell the vocal delivery, and the roomy mic sound gels it all together. I’m very proud of this recording and thankful Mum gets to enjoy it too.
And that’s the album. Please get in touch if you listened and enjoyed it. I don’t care about likes, or adds, or follows, or shares or any of that bollocks. It doesn’t actually help publicise the record, but I’d love to hear if it has moved you in any way. That’s why I became a musician, because music moved me. Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening.
Oh and I’m sorry to Ben Folds Five for ripping off Whatever & Ever, Amen so liberally.
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The new album The House I Grew Up In by Leo & The Mane is available to download or stream on all platforms now.
