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Celebrated by their family for musical genius at an early age, capable of biking great distances, ready to pour some hot tea at your local book store... there is little Leith Ross can’t do, including seeing the future! The songwriter has been renowned for their empathically excellent songwriting, quirky insightful lyrics and deft dreamy melodies, and all of that is fashioned into what is an absolute montage of excellence their latest album I Can See The Future. A brilliant collision of influences, emotional insights and humanity, its is an album that startles one into re-listening, a placeholder for your lifeline favorite thing to listen to. Wanting to know what happening in the future, and so so much more we sent some electronic signals their way to Gardner the hot tea:

OnesToWatch:
Why are you an artist? 

Leith Ross: Whoa, I like it, straight into it. The completely candid answer is that I have been writing in general, but specifically writing sounds for most of my life. Growing up, I was told that I would be a musician by every person who knew me from a very young age. I believed everyone, that it was my inevitable path in life. So I decided to try it in college. I went to college for music. And I love writing music and I love singing. And at some point, it felt like this is the only thing I know how to do. So here I am. I could give you a cheesier answer about how I love being in music and the community that it creates. But realistically, I think the reason why I'm an artist instead of a different person who has a different job and just plays music is because I was told it was my destiny. 

So you're the people's choice, predestination. I like this. 

Well, if people are my parents and their friends.

But since you play in that kind of parallel, I want to know, if for whatever terrible reason your musical talents left you immediately, is there another profession that might interest you at all? 

I have thought about this a lot, because I'm an optimistic realist. It's not totally out of the realm of possibility that some horrible thing happens and I can’t sing anymore. What would I do? Would I lose my entire identity? There’s a version of the future, where I go back to school for something academic and I open a little bookstore that's also a community space, and we serve coffee, but shitty coffee, and then we do cute little cocktails at night and I just live a quiet life somewhere. I think I would be happy with that. 


How long would you say you've been performing music for other people? 

Well, if we're going all the way back, there's a really funny video of me when I was maybe two years old in my crib. My mom is filming me and trying to get me to talk to the camera. But I refuse to talk and said, I sing the entirety of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, and then when she goes to say goodbye and turn the camera off, I'm like, I'm not done, you cut off the last verse. So imagine that child performing for people in living rooms really, really far back. But I actually started partaking in talent shows when I was 8. 

How about writing? When did you start making original music? 

I started writing songs to process my life when I was 12. They were obviously so bad – they were about homework and how my friends are sweeter than me. My first real batch of songs that I wanted to do something with, I wrote when I was 18. I was in my first year of college. 

Diving into your songwriting process, what, if anything, has changed since your first batch of songs at 18? 


Almost nothing. I've almost never in my life sat down and been like, okay, I'm going to write a song in this half hour window. I'm definitely a person who writes songs when – I mean, it sounds kind of cheesy – when I'm experiencing a really strong emotion that I need to express or else it feels like it's going to hurt me. Then I will sit down and write the whole song. For the most part, I just leave them and don’t edit either. And that's always the way I've done it. 
It's the way I still do it. When I try to do it any other way, the songs just aren't as good. I feel like that's because I'm not actually locked into what I'm feeling and I'm not actually like being as honest as I can be when I am feeling desperate to express something.

Wow, a lot to unpack there. Someone once explained music to me as trauma bonding – stemming from that idea, does pain have to be the trigger for your need to write? 

Good question. I don't know if I've ever written a song purely out of joy. I have written a lot of happy songs, but there has to be a twinge of something else, you know? So, a perfect example is an almost straight ahead love song on this new record called “Point of View.” It's mostly a straightforward love song, but it was born out of the philosophical concept that you cannot write anything that isn't from your own perspective. You cannot experience the world from anybody else's perspective. We all only know things about the world that we're in through our own eyes. That idea just started to trip me out, and then I was thinking about that in the context of love, specifically a romantic relationship, thinking about how I'm never fully going to see what the other person sees and they’re never going to see what I see and we just have to trust each other and tell each other about it. So it's a straight ahead love song, but branches from this philosophical curiosity about what it means to be in a relationship with someone when you can only experience it from your own point of view. 

Well, what a great pivot to your beautiful record. It begs a question. Can you see the future? How are we doing? 
Are we okay? 

You know, I think the record is partially about me choosing that we will be. I think the more of us that are on board, the more likely it makes it. So I'm happy to do that. 

For you, is this record a collection of songs that are a moment in time, bookmarked by a beginning and end? Or is this more of a collection of events you needed to process that is not sequential in any fashion? What makes this record cohesive for you? 

It came together naturally because I write so much. There were a lot of songs to choose from. “Grieving” is an outlier – I wrote that song many years ago – but most of these were written in the same year-long period. That’s what naturally ties them together. In that season of my life, I was thinking about a lot of the same concepts, and it's not chronological by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a snapshot of some common themes, things that I was thinking about and cared about in relationships and how my life was changing. It's all kind of tied in that way. I always find self-editing such an interesting process and I observationally feel that it's the hardest thing to do as an artist: to know what to leave out. 

So if you're a prodigious writer like you admitted to, how does that work? 
How do you decide what makes the cut and what doesn't? 

In this case, I partially leaned on Rostam. I brought a lot more songs than we ended up choosing, and I asked him what resonated with him. I asked some other friends too, to have third person perspectives on it. I get a little lost in it otherwise. Of course I have favorites that I pushed to be on the record, but for the most part, I don’t know. I dream of one day releasing all my voice memos. I feel like all the songs can have a place in the world, but some of them maybe just belong together on one record and where I need a dear friend to make those decisions and trust them. 

Life's short. Just put everything out there, you know? If everything comes together, if this album works out for you, where does that take you? What does that future look like?

I have no idea. To be completely frank with you, these are the sort of things that I sometimes try not to think about. In my life, I’m recently really trying to practice being present and divorce these ideas of success that the music industry makes me feel pressured to have. I’m trying to look at things from a different perspective and be okay with whatever happens. I really have no idea how it's going to be received and generally, I'm trying not to care and to care more about feeling good and giving validity to the inevitable experiences of people who do like it and valuing that a lot more. So, I’m not super in my head about if it doesn’t do the thing I dreamed it would do. Maybe that's just a beautiful surprise for me to encounter later on. 

Pivoting into what I hope will be more fun questions. If you could create the dream concert lineup – with you performing as well, of course – who would perform, and where would it be? 

Whoa. Crazy question. 

Do you ever think of this? Do you ever think, like, I would love to perform with said person or if you watch some old footage of Woodstock or something, do you get the feeling that it would be amazing to perform there? 

Maybe I don't. When I think about things like that, I always crave the kind of underbelly experiences. I don't so much crave playing a really cool festival with a bunch of really cool artists. I crave being invited to a really cool singer-songwriter circle in someone’s house nd we’re bonding and talking about the world and having tea. I really value the non-performance aspects of being in a scene and collaborating with cool people. I might rather have a group dinner. 

Oh, wow. You're here for the people. Amazing pivot for me. How's this? If the album fulfills your wildest dreams, and you decide to do a group dinner, where would you go? What would you eat? 


Okay, ideal group dinner, we’re in a beautiful coastal pub in Ireland or Scotland. Everyone's traveled out. They're staying in some cute B&Bs in the area. We're having steak and wine and maybe a really good potato salad and we're all having a really nice conversation and maybe we go for a walk by the sea afterwards and we're getting drunk, but not too drunk, just drunk enough to have some pretty intense philosophical discussion. And then we're like jamming to music at the end of the night. 

Count me in when that happens. If you need to be tranquil, give yourself some flowers, some time, some space, do you have a routine? Do you do anything to rest your mind? 

I'm trying to get into meditation, but I don't currently. I would say my go-to is getting outside in some way. I've been biking a lot. Also reading, sitting on my back porch or in a comfy chair, reading a novel, or something that kind of allows me a little bit of escapism. 

When you go riding, is it distance or just go until your head is clear?

Yeah, that. In Winnipeg, where I live, there's these really cool bike path signs, so it takes you off of main roads. Sometimes I'll just go and follow them until I feel better and then turn around and follow them home. But it's nice because I don't have to be looking at a map. 

I will bug you about music recs in a second, but I’d love a non-music recommendation, if you have one. Is there something you’ve gotten into lately, a book, movie, travel destination you could recommend to us? 

It's unrelated to any of the examples that you gave, but one thing that has been inspiring me so much recently is fine dining. My mom has this thing that she has always encouraged me to do, which is to not get takeout, as much as you can. Then, if you don’t get takeout, let’s say 4 times a month, you’ve saved $200. Then, instead, go to a nice restaurant where your bill is $150 and get some really cool food. I feel like we don’t value the art form of food so much anymore, and it’s a special thing. I've been putting that into practice in the last couple of months, and it's been so inspiring, and I find it such a connecting activity, too. I would never go by myself, so everyone’s trying the food together, talking about what they like and don’t like, and it’s such a beautiful human connection. Conversation always comes out of it, and it’s so fun to eat really good food. So that’s my official recommendation. 

Your mom gave such sage wisdom. Go experience things. Save your money. Now, I need some music recommendations. So one, because we’re celebrating your album, is there anything that you were listening to while writing this that inspired you? 

When I was writing this record, I'm pretty sure I was feeling very nostalgic, and I was in this mood where I didn't want to listen to any new music, and I was exclusively listening to things my parents played me. I was going through a lot of change and it felt kind of unsettling and I was clinging to these things that felt intrinsic to my life and my being. So lots of Etta James, Kris Kristofferson. There's this wonderful Scottish singer, Etti Reader. John Denver, the Beach Boys, Don McLean, Patti Griffin, John Pine, Corinne Bailey Rae. It was a lot of things that would be playing around in the house on a Sunday when we're all cleaning together or whatever. It just comforted me.

I love that. Do you have any up and coming music recs too? 

Currently, I've actually been discovering a lot of amazing new artists through an open call for tour support that I did. There’s an artist called Noa Jamir that’s amazing, and Annabelle Didai.
Pool Blood out of Toronto. Emma Harner. She's really cool guitar player and song writer.A Allegra Krieger, who I've had the opportunity to meet this past summer at a folk festival. 


Amazing. Finally, do you want to leave off with any wisdom, anecdotes, jokes. 

A beautiful little leaf just fell from the tree and landed on my laptop.
Let's see, I would say my final anecdote is that I'm hoping everyone else can see the future, too, with me. Alongside me. There’s a lot of stupid shit in the world right now, and I’m searching for understanding of how the world can be, and I hope others are searching for it, too. The guiding light of my love of music is that I believe it to be the best way to convince people to do good things. 

Beautiful. Continued success Leith, thank you for chatting with us. 

Thank you!