leyna noel

Leyna Noel, ladysinger of art-songs, is a recovering Jersey Girl who earns her keep in Oakland selling apples. She performs regularly in San Francisco, and delights in ferrying her tunes to far-flung strangers on tour. She's instructed for years at the Rock 'n' Roll Camp for Girls, in both Portland, OR, and New York City.For Noel, home is a patchwork of landscapes. Born in Great Neck, she left New York when she was still a baby for the wilds of north and then south Jersey. There she gathered memories in a house on a hill, a blueberry farm, an off-highway Hilton; a year in a motor home traveling to her fathers car races; a few summers with Great Aunt Jo in Georgia making 1-2-3 cakes in the afternoons.Things multifarious seem to be things familiar to her. It is so with Leyna Noels songs, parented as they are by the triad of instruments at her fingertips. The piano became her sweetheart at the age of sevenshe played the pots and pans before thatguitar at thirteen; a dear friend brought her a cello for her twentieth birthday.San Francisco summoned Noel to study writing, but the 200 pianos of Mills College in Oakland had something else in mind. Everywhere she wentbasement, parlor, even laundry roomsat a different piano, each in a differing state of (dis)repair. She began a project recording each piano, composing to the idiosyncrasies of each, singing to the melodies her fingers found. Her songs retain a literary flavor; only now the musician in her seeks the essence that provokes the song. And verbalizes it. Leyna Noel collects dictionariesto cultivate specificity in her lyrics, to ruminate.Song by song, Leyna Noel mourns the smallness of family, the distance and death that keeps her dusty matriarchs and patriarchs away. Her music is the cleanest way for her to find the lost and hold the far away. The solace she finds in singing, so do her audiences in listening. Following an April performance, one woman responded with a single word: incantatory.