CITYist

Leona Naess won’t cop to being the city’s last romantic. “No way!” the singer-songwriter protests, perhaps too much. “I feel like I’m so unromantic. I wear my heart on my sleeve and feel things pretty strongly, but I don’t walk the streets searching longingly for love — that would be false advertising.

“You hear Bob Dylan with Blood On The Tracks,” Naess continues. “On that record it sounds as if he’s the most amazing lover-boyfriend-husband. But when you think about it, he was probably ruthless in matters of the heart. It’s like that quote, ‘The artist is not the man.’”

She’s making a passing reference to George Sand and the writer’s idea that the best artists are the ones who go in — not content to merely relate their own narrow experience, they instead work to conjure the lives and loves of others in the search for larger truths. Part of Sand’s literary reputation stems from her practice of dressing as a man to access salons and situations normally off limits to a woman in 19th century Paris, and though comparisons end there Naess’ songwriting likewise derives much of its impact from quotidian situations. Her songs have her everywhere. And that’s the romance of her latest album Thirteens.

With its wild rush of backwards glances, unresolved conversations with lovers in absentia and mornings at the kitchen table unpacking dreams from the night before, Thirteens is the sound of a woman in love with the ins and outs of love. In one song she’s “running around/running around/running around,” and in another she’s putting on lipstick and a dress she’s sure will have some hapless dude doing the same. And she begins another by flatly suggesting, “Let’s just get married/raise our own family”. There’s through line from of 70s confessional folk pop to Naess’ music, but with its urban backdrop and revolving door of girl meets boy scenarios it feels like listening to Gershwin around this time of year — “Autumn In New York”.

The product of a multinational marriage between an interior designer and billionaire shipping magnate/mountaineer, Naess was born in New York, educated in London and started to play guitar as a teen; she returned to the city to study music and anthropology at NYU. “My senior thesis asked if humans were inherently good or evil,” she says. “Nature or nurture — away from society would we make the same mistakes? It was Lord Of The Flies stuff . . . pretty depressing at age 21.” After graduation Naess played the downtown coffee shop open mic circuit and started the decade as a promising talent with a handful of well-crafted albums that bounced around the major label system. Following the climbing death of her father in 2004, however, she took a break from the music industry schedule and ultimately lost her recording contract. Naess continued to make music; working at home in her downtown apartment with a small circle of collaborators she wrote and recorded a number of unreleased lo-fi laptop projects that eventually became the inspiration (and title) for Thirteens.

The detour from an expected trajectory brought new dimension to Naess’ work. She explains that as a songwriter she’s “always worked A-B-C. It’s boring probably.” But a couple of years mining first take vocals recorded to laptop shifted her focus from arriving at finished material to a more measured approach that mixed spontaneity and reflection. “I didn’t rush,” she says simply. “I’m protective of my songs and I wanted to sit with them. It’s easier when that happens; songs can fall out of the sky and into your lap. It’s like a stream — you’re not responsible for it.”

As a result there’s a feel of hushed introspection throughout Thirteens. The songs are constantly addressing another who isn’t there, and even when carousing with friends on the jingle-jangle barroom singalong of “Leave Your Boyfriend” it sounds as if she’s constantly thinking of being some other place. “I’ve always been attracted to songs that don’t give themselves away at first listen,” she says. They’re proper pop songs, but there’s something else there.”