"Andreone's passionate emotion"

By Anastasia O'Neil Erbe

Think about somebody you met and liked instantly, and you'll know what Leah Andreone is like.

I met her in her hotel room at the Regal Harvest House in Boulder. There was a radio promotional convention going on that weekend, and the hotel was full of recording artists, radio personalities and other industry people. I felt like I was finally in my element.

Andreone's record, called Veiled, features 11 mostly autobiographical songs. Andreone decided to call it Veiled because the emotion present in the songs is something she was, for so long, adept at covering up, she said.

The song "Mother Tongue" speaks to that issue. It's about opening up to people and letting them get to know you. It's about being vulnerable to them.

"I could stab you in the back tomorrow. You could stab me in the back tomorow, too. That's what it's about," her lyrics persuade.

All of the songs on the record are well written with catchy melodies and some incredible, almost dissonant, harmonies. Just to listen to the music, you would think they were all happy songs, but listen closely.

The latest single, "It's Alright It's OK," features African drums and a sitar track in the background, which gives the listener just a taste of the variety on the record. What's really interesting about it is the way Andreone uses her craft.

In a song about having been sexually abused, she sings "anesthetize the pain," and when her voice reaches "pain," she purposely sings off-key. The messages of the songs are not only conveyed through what she says, but also how she says it. The allegory is powerful. I'm certain this record is going to reach a lot of people because Andreone can relate to the suffering that is so common as we grow up.

The other hot topic on this record is religion. Andreone sings about religious discrimination against elements of society and how religion can let them down.

She accomplishes this persuasivley by singing from inside the ribbons of exclusion. At the same time, Androene exposes the hypocrisy that's alive in some religious circles. In "Come Sunday Morning" listeners hear a story about how sin somehow becomes OK if only we repent: "...wrong is right come Sunday morning." Monday apparently is a different story.

Andreone has a sweet voice with quite a range. It's fraught with passionate emotion. The stories of the songs are rich and vivid with a different perspective than the audience might expect.

Her partner, Rick Neigher, is the lifeblood of muchh of her work. Rick is everything, Andreone said.

Neigher did production work on the record as well as some of the songwriting. It was the good chemistry, she said, that made the record possible.

Andreone said the attention she has received lately came as a great surprise to her.

"I just wrote about things that I was feeling, and they like me for it!"

At 23, she said she's doing the only thing she cares about.

"I don't have to be all over the TV. The only thing I want to be doing is playing and singing for people."

It takes an incredible amount of stamina in the music world to keep an artist thriving. Andreone said she took a job working in a little cafe to pay the bills while doing her music.

A record company representative came in and sat at one of her tables one day. The owner was nice enough to let her go home and get a tape of her music. She put it in the hand of the record company guy just as he was leaving.

"I watched him go out to his car and put the tape in, and I saw him put his head back and listen to it," she said. "Then he drove away, and I thought 'Again! It happened again!"

"He came back the next morning at 7:30 and asked if we could arrange it so I could play for him sometime. So I played for him, and he just looked at me and said, 'Is that the best you can do?'"

After squirming for a while, he relented and offered her a deal.