Leona Naess

Meet Leona Naess.

You have before, of course. But this, Naess’s third and most fully developed album to date, might as well be her debut. “I feel like it’s my first record,” she says. “I just think it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever done.”

Produced by Ethan Johns, Leona Naess is simple music for complicated times. “It was time to make a record that was just about the songs – a record I would go and buy,” Ness says. “I’d never done that before. I was young, experimenting with what was out there – just playing the songs seemed boring to me. Now, it’s all about the songs, the voice and the guitar.”

Naess was raised in the U.K. but headed for the States at 18, leaving behind the Purcell Music School in favor of anthropology at NYU. In the past, she’s talked down her one year of formal music schooling as unemotional and unspontaneous. These days, she continues to value a uniqueness of expression that can’t be learned in any class, but wishes she could write down more of the music in her head.

By the time she graduated from college, Naess had made a reputation for herself on the New York club scene, attracting the attention of producer Scott Litt’s now-defunct Outpost label. Ultimately, that connection resulted in her 2000 MCA debut Comatised, followed by 2001’s I Tried to Rock You But You Only Roll. Over the course of the two records Naess toured with Eagle-Eye Cherry, David Gray and Ryan Adams, earned comparisons to Jeff Buckley, Edie Brickell, Beth Orton and Carole King, and scored rave reviews from the likes of Time, Rolling Stone, Flaunt and Detour.

In one sense, Leona Naess is a reaction to I Tried to Rock You.., a sonic smorgasbord that she says was “a producer’s record more than a songwriter’s record,” inspired by Prince, Sinead O’Connor and even Radiohead. In another sense, the new one owes a debt to the White Stripes and the Strokes – not because Naess’s music sounds like theirs, but because those bands helped create an atmosphere of no-BS artistic freedom that inspired her to simultaneously take risks and keep things basic. She also looked to old favorites like Dylan, Neil Young and Roberta Flack.

The key to it all was Johns, son of legendary producer/engineer Glyn (the Who) and an accomplished studio guru in his own right (with, among others, Adams, Counting Crows and Rufus Wainwright). “He’s a master of sound,” Naess raves. “He doesn’t use a lot of effects to make things stand out, it’s pretty dry and up front. His goal is to make music sound as amazing and beautiful and pure as possible.”

Naess and Johns retreated to a homemade space in North Hollywood which they dubbed “Alley Studios,” a wooden-walled room with no TV, no computers and no isolation for the recording console. Naess sang and played guitar, Johns handled everything from drums to dulcimer and Richard Causon was on piano. The core philosophy, reflected in everything from the lack of electronics to the modest (but absolutely stirring) three-piece string section, was “anything we put on here has to be missed if we take it out.’

“It’s all pretty much live instruments, and some songs are third or fourth takes,” Naess continues. “It’s a different feeling: warm, intimate and timeless-sounding. Sometimes the vocal was bleeding through the drum and piano mics, but I’m always in favor of mistakes – some of the best things that ever happened to me in life have been mistakes.”

A nugget of wisdom can be heard throughout Leona Naess, which is all about love and its life lessons. And not just love in the boy-meets-girl sense, but love for family, love for children and being ready to accept or give love in general. “The first five songs are kind of about trying to let go of the past, and the last six are about looking to the future,” Naess says.

“Calling” is “literally that, it lulls you in, it’s about being ready for whatever comes,” while “Home” was inspired by the unsettled feeling of being on the road and Naess’s distance from her U.K. family. The wounded but witty strum of “Don’t Use My Broken Heart,” (“to pick up other girls,” goes the next line) and the gentle haunt of “Christmas” show off the delicate gulp and throaty warmth of Naess’s vocal beauty, while “He’s Gone” is simultaneously catchy, heartbroken and lacerating.

“Even the sad songs are kind of accepting,” Naess says. “Like, it’s good to feel *something*, or ‘thank god that happened, because look where I am now.’ We all get fucked up from love, but at the end of the day it’s brilliant and amazing. All the best records ever made are about love because the ideal is to find the perfect love song – the one the most people can relate to, the one that explains how we all feel. It’s like fingerprints: no love song is alike.”

Leona Naess is ample proof of that.