Hailing from Calgary and now living in Scotland, with stops in Finland, Iceland and the Pacific Northwest along the way. L.T. Leif is a songwriter shaped and inspired by the scenery and spirit of the north. Described as a meditation on “the body, loss as a decision, and knowing your own desire as a radical act,” new album Come Back To Me, But Lightly, forthcoming via Lost Map Records in collaboration with OK Pal, draws on both the imagery of these northern climes and the talent which resides there to create songs able to explore intimate processes of development.
“This album comes from a six-year long space of change,” Leif explains, “from a life I was living as someone afraid of my own brain and body, into someone a lot more openly unshiney. Painful and seeping. I think that distance and decisions and loss and conflict are all things that can birth you into a different kind of being.” This is achieved with contributions from Clea Anaïs, Bill Wells, Matt Swann, Clarissa Cheong and Bart Owl (of eagleowl) and Faith Eliott and Mark Hamilton (of Woodpigeon), leading to a sound that’s minimalist but rich in its quiet detail.
Latest single ‘Pass Back Through’ captures the album’s tone. A song written in the aftermath of loss, confronting the non-linear phenomenon of grief and its penchant for dragging old wounds back from the past. A time in which it is all too easy to get baffled by the repetition of your interior landscape, lost in circling thoughts. But with ‘Pass Back Through’, L.T. Leif seeks a way out through the clarity of cold air and wide open spaces. Looking to the northerly landscape as a kind of catharsis.
“There’s a smallness I would feel when walking in the cold Finnish nights that brought a kind of clearness or release,” they explain. “There’s this feeling I sometimes got when a bird would fly low over my head from behind, like they were somehow a thought of mine that was bursting forth and flying off, fading out there into the distance… I can get really mired in my own thoughts, and there’s like a release, or a lift that comes when you can let the rich pain and pleasure of the world just be.”
