It all started with a piano and a killer stereo. Those are the early tools that can start most musicians on their path; something to listen to, and something to attempt to learn how to play the music you or the people in your home are digging. Add in musician parents, and it’s easy to see that’s what you may get into later in life.
It’s how Grammy-nominated Leslie Mendelson started down her musical road. Mendelson is a musician whose sounds walks a line between soulful, plugged-in folkie, and roots and jam-influenced rocker, and it was her parents with that aforementioned equipment – that was all the Brooklyn, New York-based musician needed to know that music was going to be the road traveled.
Mendelson will perform a solo set in Durango on Saturday at the Light Box at Stillwater Music. It’s Durango’s newest venue, with this being the space’s second show.
“We had a piano at home. So, I kind of just naturally gravitated toward it,” she said. “There was a lot of music around because my dad was a trumpet player, and we had a great stereo system, so all the records we played, everything sounded amazing. I just listened to the radio or something on TV, and I would go run to the piano and try to learn it. So, I kind of had a good ear early on.”
Formal music lessons came in fifth and sixth grade, and while Mendelson was lukewarm on official lessons, they did help lift her up in her other classes, while also planting the idea in her head that when it came to music, she was going to do her own thing.
Which she’s done.
With a handful of EPs and LPs under her belt, including 2020’s full-length “If You Can’t Say Anything Nice,” which dropped at the start of the pandemic lockdown, and the stripped-down “In The Meantime,” Mendelson has proved to be a diverse musician, capable of doing the solo, cut-back folkie thing, or plugging in and giving songs some volume. She has also kept some great company, dropping a duet with Jackson Browne; recording with stellar session players like Waddy Wachtel and Lee Sklar on her forthcoming record; and making music with players from the Grateful Dead community, whose ability to dip into multiple genres of music and use them as tools for a free-form approach to making music remains influential in her own work.
If you go
WHAT: Grammy-nominated songwriter Leslie Mendelson.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Saturday.
WHERE: The Light Box at Stillwater Music, 1316 Main Ave.
TICKETS: $20, available online at https://tinyurl.com/4y345xzp.
MORE INFORMATION: Visit www.stillwatermusic.org/the-light-box.
“You think about the Grateful Dead, that was an interesting vehicle when I was a kid because they were such proprietors of roots music and folk music, and bluegrass, rock and country, and seen through the lens of them, its interesting. That was early on, but yeah, a good song is a good song, and I think you can take a song and you can extend it and be improvisational about it,” she said. “Like when I worked with Steve Kimock and Bob Weir, taking regular songs and expanding on them, or when I do my own stuff, and I kind of strip things down.”
Chasing the song, no matter what genre, is what keeps Mendelson going. She’s as happy banging out a killer cover as she is writing something new. Genre be damned; it’s really all about the song.
“I keep finding these covers, like new wave music from the ’80s. I do a couple covers like by Elvis Costello or Chrissie Hynde, and I’ll take it down to like a really basic minimum on the guitar where its completely sparse,” Mendelson said. “But at the end of the day, it’s just about the song. I like good songs.”
Bryant Liggett is a freelance writer and KDUR station manager. Reach him at liggett_b@fortlewis.edu.
