Interviews // Leah Callahan (Turkish Delight / Betwixt / The Glass Set)

Leah Callahan’s musical journey started back in Boston in the 1990s, when she joined Turkish Delight, a band who fused influences of noise-rock and Riot Grrrl and were well known around the city for, “confusing the heck out of people”. After Turkish Delight’s demise in 1997, Leah formed the band Betwixt, before stepping out solo in the early 2000s with her debut album, Even Sleepers. – For the Rabbits

What do you want people to take away from your music?

Leah: I guess I would like people to take away, especially for this album is the message of hope that you can survive no matter what. Because I’ve gone through a lot of things in my life, and I’ve survived, and I’m doing well. And I look out and I see a world of people are really suffering from anything, from drug addiction to mental health issues. And it’s really hard for me to see all that suicide, and I went through a lot of that. So now I’m like, I know that if I can survive, and I didn’t have a support system, I didn’t come from much money, but I’m doing well. If I can do it, anyone can, basically. I wanted people to come away with some kind of hope. And I think the fact that a lot of the darker parts of my music are still there, I’m not, like, this kind of fake, like, fake- happy. There’s definitely still kind of an undercurrent of pain and sadness, but on the surface, I’m obviously surviving.

That’s awesome. It sounds like you’re thriving a little bit.

Leah: I’ve been thriving pretty much, probably. I mean, I’ve always been thriving, but I’m suffering a lot less than I did say when I was younger.

So what’s your songwriting process like?

Leah: It has a lot to do with the timing. There was a big period where I didn’t do anything, but I get inspired by people. I get inspired by events. I have a drive to put out music because for many years of my life, I felt, I wouldn’t say bullied from real or imaginary bullies to quit. And so now I’m really driven that I want to make up for lost time. I have this drive to create, this desire to leave something behind.

That drive, and also just a vivid imagination. When I write a song, I’ll write almost a complete song. But acapella, so that’s the songwriting process. I’ve been lucky to find people right now with Chris, who is my collaborator on this album, who is a phenomenal musician who plays multiple instruments, who is incredible. He can just almost jam with my voice as if I were playing a guitar or piano. So that’s the songwriting process. I come in with an almost completed song, and on this album, at least one of the songs was completely written by him. So that’s kind of fun.

Tell us a little bit about your ten albums in ten years project.

Leah: I feel like I was kind of forced out of music because I didn’t feel a lot of reasons. I felt old. There was definitely online chatter. They were not kind to women, and online, the Boston music scene was not very kind to women. It was a lot of sexism and then a combination of I’ve always had to work full time, or at least more recently. It was exhausting to do all my own music writing, all my own promotion. I booked all the shows, I did everything, and I got to a point where I was literally physically exhausted, to the point where I couldn’t sleep, and taking Ambien didn’t help, so I had to quit.

So, coming back, I’ve been lucky enough to have a really stable job for many years now. I work almost full time, not 100% full time, and I used to have to work a lot more hours, and so that gives me a little bit of time and the security. I’m not always looking for a job now, so that gave me the opportunity and also being inspired by, I had reunions with two of my bands, and they were really well received.

So that gave me the confidence to get back on stage, because once I got off the stage, it was very hard for me to get back on. I had lost all my confidence. So then when I gained all that back, now I’m like, all right, I’m putting out an album a year. And so that was the challenge of making up for that lost time. And I feel creative, pretty creative. I guess that’s the project, really.

So will you tell us a little bit about how the music scene had changed from the time you were in the bands in the 90’s when you took your hiatus and then reentered the scene?

Leah: I had kind of taken a hiatus in early 2000. In 2000 I wasn’t having much luck getting a band together. I had gotten older. All the people I knew had gotten older, moved on, had families, left Boston. So I actually did a foray into theater, which was really fun. I met some really interesting people, kind of did performance art.

I booked all my own shows and met a lot of cool people who some careers have been taking off, and they’re doing well. But I guess I ended up getting sucked back into the rock scene. This is a time between around 2000 and 2006. There was literally just a period of six years, six or seven years, going into the practice space with a rock band for the first time in at least six years.

And I was just shocked. Every other minute I’d be turning my head, like, ‘what is happening?’ Because my experience from 1994, 95, 96 were you’d have rooms and rooms and rooms of bands performing, and it was all guys. And maybe one in every ten bands had a woman, maybe one in every 20. And obviously, I would often end up on bands with women and the Middle East, the underground scene had a lot of women–or not a lot, but I knew of them all. There were probably ten of them.

But the Boston band scene, which had really all sorts of different types of music, you just didn’t have that many women. And there’s reasons for that. It wasn’t super supportive. So, to see that extreme change in the culture between 1999 and 2006 was phenomenal. It was this whole new generation of women in their early 20s who were in bands and almost every band had a woman. And it was very different from when I was in my day. Very unusual!

So do you ever struggle with impostor syndrome or does confidence in your work come naturally?

Leah: Yeah, I struggle all the time. I flip between this idea of what is the word of thinking I’m the greatest thing in the world. What is that? Oh, delusions of grandeur. And I think, wow, this album is amazing. They’re going to have college courses on me. And then of course that wouldn’t help me much if I get the college courses out from the dead. But I have these delusions of grandeur, I’ll be honest, I do. And then the next day I’m like, ‘why am I doing this? This is horrible. I suck. No one likes my music. Wow, this is the dumbest thing. What is wrong with me?’ That’s my typical week.

All in one week.

Leah: Oh yeah, it’s a disaster. But I mean, I’m dealing with it. I’m not quitting music every other day. I’m not going to quit, sticking with it.

Please tell us about Nowhere Girl.

Leah: So, nowhere girl, it’s a long song. It’s a six-minute song. I think Chris, my collaborator, he wrote a chorus for it, and he really stretched that to be six minutes for me. The lyrics, obviously, for all my songs, because I write acapella lyrics, are super important. I had a lot of ideas when I was thinking about those lyrics, I was thinking about myself.

I was thinking about iconic films. Thelma and Louise, for example. It’s kind of a stretch, but they challenged society. They were on their own terms. But ultimately, what happened is they became outlaws, not because of their own fault. I also thought about this movie I’d just seen, too, called Hollywood Babylon, which is based on some true characters.

And Margot Robbie’s character, in the end, she had some real danger, and she could have escaped it, but I think, metaphorically, her character just wanted to live this wild life, and she wanted to live life on her own terms. And for me, I think I always have felt kind of like a nowhere girl, kind of on the periphery of society, not really fitting in. And a lot of it is because the idea of being happy and well-adjusted in a world that seems so dead set on destruction to live and try to fit in with people that I find their values horrific.

I think a lot about words, for example, ‘periphery’. You’re on the fringe. And humans we are very social animals. And it is a struggle. If you want to be a nowhere girl, you want to live on the edge. It’s not an easy place to be. It’s a struggle every day. But it’s also a very creative place because the synonym of the word periphery is the word ‘brink’ or the word ‘verge’. It’s a very creative place.

And after I had written the song, I never gave the ideas to Chris, but musically, he really brought them to life. And his lyrics are slightly different from mine, but they’re still quite interesting. And he looked it up and he said, there’s actually a show, a reality show in Hong Kong called Nowhere Girls. And it’s about girls that aren’t popular, are unfashionable and have a bad attitude, and they don’t fit into society. I said, that is perfect. I would love to, because I’m like, my whole idea is like, what is fashionable, what is fitting into society is fitting into a really rotten thing. So anyway, that’s kind of the core of that song.

What’s your favorite memory about working on this album?

Leah: My favorite memory about working on this album is when I’ve written the song Curious tourist, and I got the arrangement back from Chris, who is my co songwriter and collaborator. And he’d spliced another completely different song onto it and said, keep an open mind. But I absolutely loved it and I heard the music and it was just so unlike anything I’ve ever done. It had elements of world music, I would say it’s like Nick Cave meets Sade, and it just has this amazing kind of cool–there’s even, like, saxophone in it, like film noir saxophone. So that was, I think, one of my, I enjoyed all the experiences, but that was probably the one that just really surprised me. When I heard what he came up with my song, I was so excited.

Leah Callahan’s new album, Curious Tourist releases on April 29, 2024