It was not a very good time a few years ago for New York-based British singer and songwriter Leona Naess. Although she already established herself since her first album, 2000’s Comatised, Naess now admits that she was unhappy and lonely back then. She was seeing her friends were in relationships while she felt “all over the place.” Then she experienced tragedy in 2004 when her father, Norwegian businessman Arne Naess, Jr., died in a mountain climbing accident.
“I went back to live with my mother [in London],” Naess, who plays at Southpaw tonight with recovering heartthrob Evan Dando, recalls. “The idea of being away from home and out in that world of music can be really scary and soul-destroying, because you’re really putting yourself out there. I was like, ‘I’m done with music. Maybe I’ll go back to school.’”
Four years later Naess has reemerged with her latest record, Thirteens, which was released in the fall. It is a predominantly folky album that draws on pop and soul influences. “It was a very natural process,” she says. “It wasn’t like someone was breathing down my neck going, ‘You must have this record done.’ The only person that cared was myself.
“I went the wrong way, I think, in the music,” she continues. “I signed a big record deal at a young age and I had a lot of pressure. I didn’t get time to figure things out, and I kind of did it with everyone standing over me. In some ways I was lucky that it never really happened. I didn’t make a huge mistake in front of the world. [With this record] I found the people that I wanted, and I was very vigilant about it. It was good.”
The album contains several reflective songs including “Learning As You Go,” which Naess explains was about being somewhat nave. “I had a pretty privileged and lucky childhood in some ways,” she says. “From the records that I had done before they were just all about losing boyfriends and there wasn’t kind of a lot of depth there.” Asked if this was her most personal album yet, Naess says that her perspective has changed. “It made all the little things [that] used to keep me up at night kind of no longer did because they were just meaningless.”
Despite its serious overtones, Thirteens offers a moment of levity with the joyous-sounding and very poppy “Leave Your Boyfriends,” written through the eyes of someone turning 30 and whose old friends are beginning to fall in love. “People think this song is about trying to hook up with people’s boyfriends and girlfriends,” she says. “But it’s not. It’s more like ‘Come out and just leave that other side of you behind, and let this be the way it was before.’ You know, sometimes when you want to be with your guy friends. So I think that song was a relief from the pain I was going through.”
Naess is performing tomorrow at Brooklyn’s Southpaw. She is also planning her next project. “I’m starting to make a record,” she says, “just because if you stop, you die. That’s an exaggeration [but] I think you have to keep moving forward or otherwise you kind of get stuck.”
Dec. 19, Southpaw, 125 Fifth Ave. (at Sterling Pl.), Brooklyn, 718-230-0236; 8, $15 advance/$17 day of the show.
