Meet Odie Leigh, the rising folk star who ended up making a viral song on TikTok as a bet
Before Odie Leigh became one to watch in modern folk, she thought she didn’t deserve to be a musician. Years ago when she was studying film at Loyola University in New Orleans, she watched the music students grind to learn theory, play as many live gigs as possible, and seek out a team to help grow their careers.
All she wanted to do was write songs on an old guitar and share them on the internet, but the voracious effort of the people around her made it seem like that wasn’t good enough.
READ MORE: Meet Nieve Ella, the indie powerhouse who doesn’t need to impress anyone
Then she heard the innocent croons and acoustic picking in Talkin’ Like You (Two Tall Mountains) by Connie Converse, and her mindset fell into place.
“I heard that song, and I was just like, ‘Wow! Music can be whatever you want it to be.’ You don’t have to have an entire production team. You don’t have to have a music video. You don’t have to have a manager. You don’t have to have any of these things that all these people around me in college were scrambling to have,” Leigh tells Guitar.com. “You can just express a thing and people will enjoy it.”
Soon a few things she wanted to express will take the form of her debut album, Carrier Pigeon. Leigh always wanted to express things, but it took her a while to find her outlet. She had early exposure to music, singing in a church choir because her grandfather literally built the church. Around eighth grade, she taught herself to play guitar, but she quickly lost interest in it.
“I stopped playing for the rest of my life,” Leigh says. Following the cessation, she thought film was going to be her source of expression. Then the pandemic set in. Leigh found herself isolated like everyone else, but she also felt strangely free to express herself. So, she picked up the guitar again.
She was living with two rappers at the time, and they made a bet to see who could make a viral song on TikTok first. Leigh wasn’t initially included in the bet, but she joined out of spite…and won.
She wrote a “polyamorous country anthem” as her second video on TikTok, and it now has over 50,000 views. Since then her TikTok has grown exponentially. At the time of writing, she has over 132 thousand followers, 2.9 million likes, and numerous videos with millions of views.
“[TikTok] made it where I, someone who knew no one, never had any intent in being a musician, never had any experience in music, and lived somewhere without any industry was able to be a full-time musician,” Leigh says.
Now as a full-time musician, she has a manager, agent, publicist, and a label. But she built those relationships on her terms.
“If you use [TikTok] right you no longer feel like you need anyone for anything. I know that at the end of the day, I got myself here and I must continue to work my hardest to get to where I want to be,” Leigh says.
Image: Shervin Lainez
Follow Your Heart
She also didn’t need anyone when she chose her guitars. For the most, she doesn’t care about the brands. She doesn’t know what guitars she used to record her album. The first guitar Leigh learned to play belonged to her brother. When she started playing professionally, she bought a brown guitar because she was wearing brown pants a lot at that time and she wanted one that matched her outfits.
“When I would hear people talking about equipment, I would just be like, ‘Oh, I’m so stupid! These things are beyond me. I’ll never be able to understand if I don’t even know what guitar I’m playing’,” Leigh says. “When in reality it doesn’t matter what it is. Just go make something.”
On her recent tours, she has been playing a Gretsch Electromatic Double Jet in Tahiti Red. She bought it because she thought it was pretty, but she doesn’t use it in her TikTok videos. She thinks the run-down guitars sound better when she’s recording audio on her iPhone. In her viral video of Crop Circles, she wasn’t just using her old acoustic, but she had the wrong strings on the guitar as well.
“I’ve never been able to make a guitar sound like that again,” Leigh says. “The lack of knowledge is what allows people to create incredible music because if you’re doing everything ‘right’ you’re going to sound like everyone else.”
Leigh doesn’t care about being “right.” She was drawn to the idea of expression because she often felt completely overwhelmed by her emotions when she was younger. She needed a way to get them out immediately.
“I write songs in the moment to stop me from doing other crazy things,” Leigh says. “Before I write a song it’s this very intense seed of a feeling deep inside of me.”
Every song she shares represents her immediate feelings in the moment. Specifically, many of the songs on Carrier Pigeon are about her feelings towards a lover. They include candid lyrics like on Either Way when she sings:
“Do you wanna know me like I wanna know you?/I wanna know you, Do you wanna kiss me like I wanna kiss you?/I wanna kiss you”
Carrier Wave
Now as she’s on the cusp of sharing her debut album, she’s in an interesting position. Given the process of what it takes to release a body of work, the emotions across the ten songs on Carrier Pigeon are from long in the past. That’s where the title comes from. The album is like a carrier pigeon, delivering what she was going through however many moments ago.
“The experience of the moment is gone. It’s removed. For a long time, I would immediately write a song and immediately put it on the internet. But now I’ve gotten a little bit more professional with the way I do things,” Leigh says.
However many years after her peers made her think she didn’t deserve to be a musician, she is doing what all of them were striving to do. Odie Leigh may not have blown up the “right” way, but she’s here, and she’s expressing the things she wants to express.
Odie Leigh’s debut album ‘Carrier Pigeon’ is out now
The post Meet Odie Leigh, the rising folk star who ended up making a viral song on TikTok as a bet appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
