By Dean Gordon-Smith - Vernon Morning Star

A confident and surprising sound is unveiled on the first album from singer/songwriter Leah West.

West, who calls Kelowna home, is originally from New Jersey, and her new album Beyond Words is a chilled-out work of semi-laid back indie-rock with elements of folk and pop sounds moving around the edges.

The soft-edged production of multi-instrumentalist Marty Rifkin (Bruce Springsteen, Jewel) adds a mellow shimmer to West’s understated voice.

A few of West’s songs are on the borderline of a country-pop vibe, but go beyond into more atmospheric areas.

Orange Bliss and Simple Love are easy-flowing ethereal pop songs with jazz-like vocal inflections. This textural approach contains effective strength in the ballad-driven material (Anything For You, Destiny’s Calling) where moody elements brought out in West’s vocals are matched by the simple arrangements.

Minor-key themes abound throughout Beyond Word, and are especially evident on the chilly Forbidden Fruit, where the mood is nearly skewered by tricky production.

The unadorned character of West’s voice has a beguiling quality that shines through the material that moves away from pop elements. The title track is strong evidence of this haunting sound at the fringes of the song: part Loreena McKennit and Natalie Merchant.

Middle of the road tracks like Caught in Your Web and Gravity sound ordinary by comparison and out of place here; a forced fit of standard songs and ideas.

Magic moments happen on I’m Not Invisible, where the honesty in West’s vocal and lyrics bring on an inspired performance.

by Angie Courtine

While most Canadian musicians end up moving to the United States, Leah West went the other way. This American Singer/Songwriter/ Actress moved to Canada to put herself in our “Vibrant Canadian Music Scene” Although on Leah’s myspace account it’s classified as Rock / Indie/ Pop, I’m really hesitant to place her in a categorized box. West is definitely a surprising listen with an acoustic sound that only adds to her music. She has a unique talent for writing songs with different kinds of melodies, and, each song seems to captivate her audience with seemingly personal experiences. Her seductive high energy vocals can lend credence to the "pop" sound of her music but her melodic vocals lead to a different venue. What a lovely contradiction which remains haunting the listener for days to follow.

Currently working with producer, Marty Rifkin (Bruce Springsteen, Jewel, Tom Petty, Elton John, Dwight Yoakam, Leanne Rimes, and Glen Campbell) Leah West is quickly rising to the top and One2One had the opportunity to interview this artist.

O2O: Do you find there's a limitation to being a female singer in Canada?
L.W.: No I don't think that it's a limitation being a woman at all. Women have a beautiful perspective of the world, totally different from men. We need to embrace both perspectives in order to acheive balance in our society. Also, I think if you are going to be a female artist, Canada is a great place to be. It's a very supportive environment here for all types of music, and all types of artists. I also try to see the opportunities in any given situation. I usually try to look at limitations as simply challenges from which to grow and to try to find the answers to.

O2O: Where do you find your inspiration?
L.W.: Everywhere, literally.
Nature, love, relationships, our spirituality, things of beauty, as well as times of tragedy.
A song is just another way to convey a message or tell a story.
There are lots of stories to tell in this world.



O2O: Which song that you've recorded is your favorite? Why?
L.W.: "Beyond Words" because I knew it wasn't going to be a radio single and I had free reign to make it true to my original spiritual idea without compromising the length or the authenticity. When I wrote it, I knew it was a magical song. And when my producer, Marty Rifkin and I started to lay down the first track of the acoustic guitar, I got chills.

O2O: Who are your influences?
L.W.:Wow, this would be a long, long list, so I'll try to refrain from going overboard.
Sarah McLachlan, Peter Gabriel, Sheryl Crow, Sting, Cat Stevens, Eva Cassidy, U2, Radiohead, Ella Fitzgerald, Simon & Garfunkle, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Loreena McKennitt, Jann Arden, Alanis Morissette, Ennio Morricone, Otis Redding, Damien Rice, Eddie Vedder, and Paula Cole. I grew up playing piano, so a lot of the great classical composers really shaped me, too. I've only recently started playing and writing on guitar, instead of piano. Some amazing new musical discoveries for me are Tom Stinson, Ryan Donn, and Kevin Parent.

O2O: How do you define success?
L.W.: When you find peace in your heart, in your soul, and in your life.

O2O: When did you know that you wanted to become a singer?
L.W.: There's a difference between wanting to sing and becoming a singer.
I've always been singing. According to my parents, when I was a baby I sang more than talked!
I always knew I loved the arts and I've explored a lot of different avenues creatively.
It was when I started to have this giant pile of songs I wrote and realized that I needed to get them out of me. Once I started recording, it was an old question that I finally felt like there was an answer to. I realized how much I needed, not wanted, to sing. It was a necessary step that I just knew I needed to make. I think it's when you can't live without something, it just becomes a part of you. Living without music, for me, is failing to live my life as I was destined to. That's when I became a singer.

O2O: Celine Dion doesn't talk for the day when she is performing...
do you have any rituals before a show?
L.W.: No, I actually talk the day of a show! I used to be a total perfectionist and to a large degree, I still am. But with time and experience, I've learned that there is always a "better", always a "to-do list" and we will die someday with things still left undone. I'm hear to enjoy life, help others and learn. If I get too crazy with perfection, I miss the point. I've learned that most people want something real and passionate, not something sterile and perfect. In general, I try to rest before a show, but sometimes you have to perform on no sleep and let adrenaline and the energy from the crowd carry you. I try to stay hydrated throughout the day and during a performance. I can usually sing for a good 3-4 hours, but after that, I have to really work hard to maintain pitch and energy. I guess I'm pretty laid-back about my regime. Sometimes I drink hot tea and honey, other times I have a glass of wine.

O2O: What do you do for fun?
L.W.: Walk with my dog, hang with friends and family, I like boating, skiing, kayaking, biking. I love being in nature and traveling. I also paint with oils and I love to dance!


O2O: Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
L.W.: I want to put out a few albums. I've written over 150 songs, so I have a lot of albums to record! I would think that I've done a few more tours, and have made a bit of a name for myself in music. I want to earn the respect of my peers. I'd also like to start a family in a few years. No matter what, I hope to always make music for the rest of my life.

O2O: What are the projects that you are working on right now?
L.W.: My next album due out sometime summer 2010.
Planning another tour for 2010 as well.
I learned a lot from my first tour in autumn 2009.
I hope to keep learning, expanding my horizons,
meeting new and interesting people and making music.

Written by Alexander Hutt

When Leah West answers the phone, I already know that she is going to be one of the most charming singers that I have interviewed. Born in New Jersey but transported to Kelowna, BC, Canada in 2005, the singer-songwriter has a pleasing voice that is synonymous with her sensational imagery from her new CD Beyond Words.

West is also a trained ballet dancer, actor, visual artist and model, but at the moment she is concentrating mostly on her music. “Life unfolds in different ways. I haven’t done any modelling for a while. Acting is something on the backburner for now, as all my energy is on my music and touring.” West has appeared in a number of smaller roles in movies. “Music is much closer to my hear, where I can express what is going on in my heart. It’s expressing the emotional creativity that I have inside.” That doesn’t mean that West cannot combine the two disciplines, as she also writes songs that appear on soundtracks for television and movies.

Right now, she is diligently working on the completion of a three year long documentary film about the medicine men in the native tribes of Costa Rica, where West spent six months (over 3 years) in a native village. “I have had some of the best experiences of my life when it was actually really bad. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t like things to get bad, but I actually got really sick. There’s lots of bugs and parasites in the jungle and not being used to a jungle atmosphere, or not being isolated from the bacteria. The documentary was not just about the tribe, but also some of the medicinal properties of the jungle. One of the tribesmen has his own little medicinal garden. He realized that some of tribes people were leaving the village and not discovering the medicine of the tribe. I learned about all this when I got really sick, but the people of the village were so good to me. These people really have nothing, but they are just so generous and pure. In their eyes there is that innocence of a child that you just don’t get in our culture."

To spread her music, West has a MySpace page, as well as a Facebook page and a personal website (www.leahwest.com). “MySpace is an interesting phenomenon, and Facebook as well. MySpace is a place for musicians because there is some sort of interaction. People can leave comments, write emails and there is more of an interaction going on as human beings. We are social beings, and the future is already here. MySpace is going to continue to evolve even though some say it’s second best to Facebook. I don’t know how many millions of people are on Facebook, but you don’t have to worry about them disappearing soon.”

On September 16th, West is going to be doing a live show at Simon Fraser University, which is not the most common site for a show. “I’m actually doing two shows and one is during the day. It’s the last show of the Summer Concert series being held at SFU, it’s an outdoor event and is free, from 11-2. I’m also doing another show on the 16th at Café Deux Soleils.”

There is plenty to look forward to from Leah, as she is appearing on Urban Rush on September 15th, then will depart on a seven week tour after the Summer Concert series.

Being a visual artist, West has included her work in the album artwork: her piece “Solace” is on the back cover. “They are both outlets for my creativity, they are both a part of me. They just express themselves in different ways. I am a visual person and a musical person. It’s like sometimes you want to cook and sometimes you want to eat out. Sometimes we are joyous, sometimes we are angry.”

“The tie into the whole visual aspect to me in Beyond Words is that I can lay all this poetry and these lyrics out and we can chat while there is so much behind what we are saying. It’s like one of those experiences where you could be talking about someone and they just call you, even after two, three years.”

“Pets know when we are sad and they are pretty amazing that way. They don’t have the layers of garbage that we do. They are more intuitive than we are. It’s about having this energy with someone and not having to speak it; that can be expressed through song or a painting. It’s also about how different people see it.”

On her personal website, West maintains a blog with a wide range of topics. “My blog is kind of all over the place, but then again so am I, so it’s just me being me. For a long time, especially when I was living in Hollywood, I was trying to be something else. I’m not saying that’s the way it has to be, I just feel more comfortable in my own skin. Sometimes [the topic] is just info or something random that happens to me.”

“I just want to share my thoughts with people. Some people are engineers that are able to make beautiful buildings. One of the things I can contribute to the big giant pie is the ability to express feelings that some people might not be able to express themselves or don’t know how to, opening them up to a new world.”

SexSoulRocknRoll.com
Oct 20, 2008
Leah West (special pick)
Written by admin in Alternative, John Drake, Rock n Roll

“Oh, new female pop singer.” “Hey, it’s out of Canada.” “Quirky lyrics and guitars.” Tuned out yet? After hearing any of these to describe a musician or a body of work I will usually dismiss it as garbage. Move on and listen to music that I know I’ll enjoy.

Well, forget presuppositions. This girl can actually sing. And while I think the genre of female pop/acoustic-alternative is f#$%d dry at this point, Leah West opens it back up for me. Her music is optimistic without being obnoxious and she’s got a remarkable talent for making her voice sound fresh in every song, even though she’s got a blue million of them. She’s apparently making a lot of people very happy with her music and there’s plenty of it to listen to for free on her website.

http://www.leahwest.com

Leah West receives an extra 25 cool points for not having a myspace page as her only website.

Leah West loses 5 of those points for mentioning her myspace within the first ten sentences of her main page, but she makes up for it with a well designed site full of pictures and tracks and things that you’ll actually enjoy - not self-promotional horse shit that most artists think you want to know about them. For this I’ll award a modest 31 points (same as the number of free songs she provides), bringing her total to 51.

Congratulations
-John Drake
i caught her music on radio dentata

Link to Review from John Drake
http://www.sexsoulrocknroll.com/blog/?s=Leah+West

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Skope Magazine - Will be featured as 'Artist to Watch' in a few months
http://www.skopemag.com

I am not active on MySpace, checking into my MySpace profile just once in a few months, probably. It’s not my main point of contact, but rather a venue to share the one song I have written and recorded thus far… which will change this summer. I usually check in just to see if anything happened I should know about, that’s about it.

Tonight, I saw a Friend Request from one Leah West (MySpace), a musician (and model, actress, painter, photographer, etc.) formerly of New Jersey and now of Kelowna, BC. I had never heard of her but am long past that sort of thing to be surprised by it. I know it’s about social networking, not necessarily people who know each other. On the same principle, if people send a Friend Request of me, I won’t turn them down unless they seem really scary… more in a social sense than physical sense. I just accept, be flattered at face value they sent me a Friend Request, a little more if they typed something like Leah did, and have a listen to their music. I often enjoy it, but that might be that. However, every once in a while, I find something that’s delightful and tonight, it was Leah West’s music!

First thing to notice was her beautiful voice. The music moves and is moving. There is breadth to it, from simple and fun songs to deep and personal songs loaded with intelligent, thoughtful, meaningful lyrics. All of them are tied together by a genuine sense of honesty that it all came from within Leah, that this is the person she is. Someone who has decided to give us the privilege to look into her soul, just the way it is, through the sounds of her music.

There are six great songs on Leah West’s MySpace profile, but her ReverbNation profile has 54 songs. I’m half way through the list now and have not found a bad track yet. So many good songs I’m starting to believe there isn’t a bad one! They are all of the pop / alternative / indie styles she classifies herself as, though, so if you have a quota on that for how much you can listen to at one time, 54 might be a bit much. Mind you, 54 of anything, even the Beatles, can be a bit much for most. Still, I believe there is a lot more to this young lady than p/a/i. With a voice and, more importantly, a spirit like hers, I think she can do and succeed in a lot of other genres. She just has to determine which of them are within her, when the time is right for her. But absolutely, I very much highly recommend you have a listen to her music at the link above.

Both profiles contain a lot of other interesting information about Leah, including artists she’s worked with, appearances and so on, but Leah’s website has even more, including her photos from modeling, acting, her blog and so on! Rocking! She’s also on YouTube as the video above shows, though it only had 280 views at time of this posting. Contrast that to the well over 1 million views her MySpace profile has had since June 24 2008 (i.e. just 10 months from this posting!).

Anyway, social networking is quite a lot like the lottery. A lot of times, there isn’t much to be gained, if not something lost like time. You have to have that mentality to play it and survive. However, every once in a while, you feel like you won something. Discovering Leah West’s music tonight has definitely been worth my while. As for her, I see she’s got close to 12,000 “friends” on MySpace, but she won over one geniune fan tonight in me!
Clay Shirky (photo from TED.com)

Clay Shirky (photo from TED.com)

Btw, did you know the mean number of Friends a user on MySpace has is 55? That’s just if you averaged out the number of friends every user had, though this should probably be 54 since everybody has Tom, the default friend on MySpace. Compare that to Facebook users who have an average of 125.

However, and this is a BIG however, the median number of MySpace friends a user has is just 2! That is, if you ordered each user in a list from most friends at one end and least friends at the other, and you walked halfway down that line, the person there would have 2 MySpace friends! (Source: Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody)

Wow! Talk about saying something about the nature and interactions of its users given people like Leah has almost 12,000!

What social networking if half the users literally have 2 or fewer friends, with 1 by default to start???

This fact is true despite MySpace still being ranked #9 on Alexa.com’s web traffic rankings at time of posting! Lots of traffic but not of the true interactive kind, obviously. At least not anywhere near where it could be. ReverbNation sits at 7,347 at time of posting, if you’re curious.

For actual web page article:

http://digitalcitizen.ca/2009/04/23/serendipitous-discovery-of-leah-wests-music/