Odie Leigh: The Best of What’s Next

For years, Paste has introduced exciting, up-and-coming artists to our readers. This is The Best of What’s Next, a profile column which highlights new acts with big potential—the artists you’ll want to tell your friends about the minute you first hear their music.

After growing up in Louisiana and studying film at Loyola University in New Orleans, Odie Leigh found herself living with two rappers during the onset of the pandemic. In quarantine, she picked up a guitar again for the first time since teaching herself how to play in eighth grade. “I’m very grateful that 13-year-old me pushed through figuring out how to play a G-chord so that 21-year-old me could just start singing and writing songs,” she says. Then, Leigh’s roommates all made a bet: Who could score a viral TikTok song first. After joining the bet out of spite, Leigh’s “polyamorous country anthem” called “Fine With Me” got 50,000 views. Her next song, “Ronnie’s Song,” blew up too and now has almost 3 million streams. Leigh’s biggest hit, “Crop Circles,” has racked up nearly 7 million streams since its release in 2022. Fast-forward to now, in 2024, and she’s got 133,000 followers and 2.9 million likes on TikTok.

The material Leigh wrote when she was a teenager still learning the ropes of guitar wasn’t, as she puts it, “a serious thing.” Once the pandemic settled in, she began having fun with it, because there “wasn’t anyone watching at the time.” “It was just like, ‘This is something I’m doing. I’m playing guitar and I’m writing songs, because I’m having fun doing it. And I think I’m doing okay,’” Leigh explains. “Then I posted on TikTok and, suddenly, there were a bunch of people saying that the songs were good. I was like, ‘Okay, I guess I’m onto something here. I’ll just keep going.’” But Odie Leigh’s debut album, Carrier Pigeon, reveals one truth about her: She’s not just some singer-songwriter whose career is contingent on her social media backstory.

Leigh’s origins in Louisiana don’t fit into the normal cultural perceptions that most non-Louisianians have of the state. She didn’t grow up in the French Quarter or the swamps. Her family wasn’t connected to Mardi Gras balls, and she wasn’t raised to be a debutant or frequent cotillions. She doesn’t speak Cajun French, either. But, a few times a month, she would stay with her grandparents in the deep, southern corridor of the state and go fishing. Leigh calls herself an “in-between,” having spent her weekdays living intimately with the American tradition of strip malls and parking lots and then, on weekends, catching frogs with her bare hands. Her family was heavily involved in their local church, where she began singing in the praise band as a teenager. “That made it more fun for me because, as a kid, waking up at 7 AM on Sunday to go to 8 AM church and getting all dressed up—it was a drag,” she says. “But I am honestly grateful for that, because having a routine is very important. And that really got me singing in choirs. Even though I had to wake up an hour earlier to get there and rehearse, singing is so much more fun than sitting in the congregation being miserable.”

Though New Orleans has its own hotbed of musical talents, sculpting careers for artists like Rui Gabriel, Chris Acker, the Lostines and Video Age, Leigh never felt like she fit into the city’s “gig hustle.” From the moment tracks like “Ronnie’s Song” and “Crop Circles” caught on, she’s had her sights set higher than playing five-hour sets at bars where patrons are talking over her in a city with such an intense drinking culture. “For someone who, at the time, was making singer-songwriter folk music, I was not going to do that to myself,” she says.

Leigh played a show at Chickie Wah Wah in January and it was, in her words, “the most rude and upsetting show” she’s ever been a part of—a gig so disastrous and disrespectful that she vowed to never play in New Orleans again. “I couldn’t hear myself sing, the people were talking so loud,” she says. “That’s just a normal thing in New Orleans, because there’s so much music and all the musicians are gigging all the time. It’s like, ‘Why would I listen to you play? You’re playing again on Tuesday.’” So, Leigh decided that she deserved a reset. After the long, exhausting tour, she moved to Detroit this spring, wanting to challenge herself to go out of her way and meet new people. “I was at a point where I was way too comfortable in New Orleans,” she admits. “Every time I went home, because I’m on tour all the time, nothing would feel new. It was like, ‘Wow, I’m in a place where everyone is having the same problems again and again.’ It felt like I was in a negative Groundhog’s Day. I felt like I wasn’t growing anymore.”

What made Detroit stick out so much to Leigh? “Detroit has a certain flavor to it that a lot of cities don’t,” she says. “With touring, I’ve been to every major city in the United States, and everywhere has the same strip with the same restaurants and the same pharmacies. Every city has cool bars and every city has tourist bars. But I wanted to move somewhere where I didn’t feel like I was overcrowding an already overcrowded space. Detroit is very much up and coming right now; there are so many abandoned houses that moving here didn’t feel like I would be displacing anyone.” She hasn’t been to the Upper Peninsula yet, but she wanted to be near the Great Lakes. Last year, Leigh was living in an RV but had dreams of buying a home. Her settling down in Southern Michigan sounds like a first step toward the success she’d once hoped for.

Once “Ronnie’s Song” took off, Leigh had 1,000 people asking her when the track would be on streaming. “Thankfully, I had a really good friend of mine help me with all of it and we got it out within a month,” she says. “It was exciting, but it was mostly anxiety-inducing, just because I was so unprepared. I felt like there was this pivot in my life where it was like the door didn’t slowly open, the door was kicked down to this new path.” After getting “Ronnie’s Song” on Spotify, it would have been easy for Leigh to take her win and try to parlay it into some grand, ceremonious dive into a new career venture. But Leigh considers herself a businesswoman first and foremost. “I knew that I wasn’t just gonna quit my life and pursue this thing,” she adds, “but I did know that I was going to keep putting time into it—because it’s something that I found fun and it’s something that was clearly working. I knew that, if I kept on doing what I was doing, then I could get to a place where it would make sense to book gigs. I knew that, if this was working, then more things would work and I’d be able to get myself to a place where I had more options and better opportunities. I knew that I would know when the right time was to say yes. And it was a year or two later.”

The internet isn’t a vacuum, though, and Leigh’s music isn’t confined to the lip-syncing clips she posts online. Her songs are being played at weddings and her lyrics are getting tattooed on people’s arms; best friends are singing the words that she sings. The internet is, for Leigh, a crucial tool to start that connection. What happens next is a measurement of luck, talent and the unpredictability of social media. “It begins organically and it ends organically,” she says. “I write a song in my room, I put it on the internet. If it does well and people connect to it, it will spread in whatever way it’s meant to.” While Leigh’s fanbase began on TikTok, she’s meeting more and more people at shows who’ve found her work through their Spotify Discover Weekly or because their friend showed them “Double Shift.” “That person commenting ‘Wow, this song means so much to me’ has a whole story of their own as to why that is true,” Leigh says. “Their mom has heard them play the song in their car. It exists in real life.”

Leigh accomplished quite a lot before Carrier Pigeon came out earlier this month. In 2023 she did a headlining tour in Europe before opening up for Shakey Graves for a couple of weeks in the Midwest. At SXSW this year, she made the rounds in Austin, including at our Paste Party. For two years, she was gathering affections and heartbreaks like mementos that might, one day, end up on the debut record her audience was waiting on. But Leigh doesn’t let herself think too long about what expectations other people have for her, because she knows that she’ll never write “Crop Circles” again. Carrier Pigeon sounds nothing like How Did It Seem To You? sounded like two years ago. “I just need to keep going in the direction that I’m being pulled in, because if I stay thinking of a past success, then I’ll never grow,” she says. “I’ll just be recreating the same thing again and again and again.”

The only expectation Leigh has for herself is that, no matter what, making music remains an intimate, enjoyable adventure. “This has always been something for me,” she says. “Writing music has always been something that brings me joy and makes me feel good. And I made an album because I finally wrote an album.” After releasing singles and EPs for three years, Carrier Pigeon is the first time Leigh felt like she “had a grip on what I’m doing. “I have full control of the process, and I feel like I’m finally writing songs that I would want to listen to,” she continues, grinning ear to ear, “which is really nice. Not to say that my old music isn’t good, but they were early songs of specific moments and, now, I just know how to play guitar.”

Leigh contradicts herself about the ethos of Carrier Pigeon. She says it’s not a folk record, but it is—if you’re the kind of person who subscribes to the idea that folk music is the music of the people, that it is earnest, honest and unforgiving. She doesn’t fit into the posse of musicians who fetishize the ideas of Americana and folk by “dressing up like coal miners with old guitars just singing made-up, sexist stories.” Songs like “Either Way,” “Conversation Starter” and “Party Trick” aren’t cosplays; they’re sincere pieces of a life Leigh’s still untangling. “This may be a folk record,” she admits, “but if you listen to it, it’s not the first thing you think. All the music I’ve ever made is just, for better or for worse, what’s going on in my life. That is one thing that will remain true. I’m never gonna lie in my music.”

Carrier Pigeon was made with lo-fi wizard Derek Ted, a Los Angeles singer-songwriter who’s worked with Kississippi and Field Medic and is quickly becoming one of the most underrated producers in the game. Leigh was reviewing songs for a website where “people send you songs and then, if you like them, you put them on your playlist and get paid to do that.” Ted had sent her a song, she liked it and they became mutuals on Instagram. “I was in Los Angeles for my first DIY tour, and he hit me up and said ‘While you’re in town, let’s record a couple songs,’” Leigh explains. “I showed up and we hung out for an afternoon, recording songs straight to a tape machine. It was great, and then we stayed in contact.” Leigh and Ted would work together on her EP The Only Thing Worse Than a Woman Who Lies Is a Girl Who’ll Tell Truths and her Treehouse Tape Sessions of “Crop Circles” and “A Month of Two.”

When it was time to make Carrier Pigeon, Leigh wanted to work with a producer she knew—and she confesses that she didn’t know many figures in the industry, at least not well enough to invite them into the consequential space of her first-ever record. “Being able to talk to someone and work with them is very important,” she says. “It was a very collaborative process.” Ted’s in-studio patience with Leigh, who recalls wanting to sit in the drum room and have her drummer hit the snare in all kinds of ways, and his philosophy around music helped her during the sessions. “I remember being worried about songs changing—recording a song one way and then being like, ‘Oh, but what if I want to sing it live this way?’ Derek was telling me how he thinks it’s cool how songs can evolve, that they start with one life in the recording and then they can evolve to something else later on,” Leigh continues. “I feel like I—and probably a lot of other people—think that the recorded version should be that final version when, in reality, we’re still just making something. Let’s make it and have a good time making it. Whatever life it has after that is its own beautiful journey.”

Upon decamping to Los Angeles to make Carrier Pigeon with Ted, Leigh had everything written but came with no demos in hand. “I didn’t have a band, but I knew that I wanted these songs to be bigger than just me and an acoustic guitar,” she says, “but I had no way of showing that.” Leigh’s first EP was just her and her guitar—“finger-picky stuff,” as she classifies it. “I didn’t even begin to understand how to get a drum player to play drums. I didn’t even begin to understand where a bass would even fit in,” she continues. “[The Only Thing Worse Than a Woman Who Lies Is a Girl Who’ll Tell Truths] became a little bit more than that. I was writing songs and, as I was writing them, I was beginning to imagine what could happen here and what could happen there, how other instruments could add more energy.”

Every EP and single was, for Leigh, her exercising different muscles and “facing a fear.” On Carrier Pigeon, she wrote songs knowing that what they sounded like in her head could be a reality. “I was allowing myself to just let the music be what it wants to be,” she concludes. “If I was letting fears and expectations get to me, this would be an acoustic folk album. But the truth is, the songs I was writing were asking to have more power behind them. [Derek and I] let the songs guide us to what they needed. I don’t think these songs could live as anything other than what they are.” And what they are are ballads and rabble-rousing singer-songwriter tunes with flecks of blues and sunshine-pop in 6/8 and filled-out with woodwinds, pitch-bends, brushstrokes of hi-fi electric guitar and visceral, bold storytelling. Leigh keeps her camera pointed at her and her alone—she concedes that her brain and body are in the clear, but that her heart is still inside playing dress up.

Leigh has a candid timbre in her voice that will allow her singing to assimilate into any arrangement any producer puts in front of her. But it’s her lyricism that will keep her name in conversations for the foreseeable future. She writes songs as a way of reckoning with the feelings unfurling inside of her, and her honesty is why lines like “You’re obsessed with not hurting me / I’m obsessed either way” and “I was busy thinking of / All the things that I could say / If, in fact, we got along / And all the questions one can ask / To turn a stranger into fun” work so well. “Most of my songs are just the first things that come out of my mouth when I start playing guitar,” she explains. “I’ll sit down with my guitar, find the chords, find that pace that matches how I feel and, then, I start singing. It’s honestly really amazing to just have my thoughts thrown out at me. I’ll write a song and be like, ‘Oh, okay, that’s what I mean. How cool? I just figured it out.’”

Carrier Pigeon is a very good breakup album written about someone Leigh once cared for deeply. Many of the songs, like “Already (On My Mind),” “A Good Thing” and “My Name on a T-Shirt,” bargain with the past, carried to the present like coming-of-age messages penned by someone Leigh no longer identifies as. She calls a lot of her songs “embarrassing, but honest.” It’s the kind of self-awareness most singer-songwriters wouldn’t dare embrace. There’s refreshing humility in accepting that our collective humanity can be a little humiliating. “I would never tell someone the things I’m singing about, but I will get on stage and sing them to 500 people—because I feel, in a way, like it’s my duty,” she says. “I get comments like ‘Wow, how are you inside my head? You’re singing all the ways I’m feeling, I didn’t know someone else felt this way.’ I think it’s important for people to know that they’re not alone in their feelings. It’s cool that I’ve been able to force myself to share these deep, dark feelings so that other people can also share them with me.”

Sharing those truths about herself isn’t always an easy task, but Odie Leigh has gotten used to it with her older work—because what was once fresh and uncomfortable is now old. “I’m constantly writing new songs and, as I’m writing them, I’m like, ‘Oh, no, why am I doing this? Why am I saying this?’” she says. “But I think that is where the power comes from. That’s where the honesty and the vulnerability is.” Leigh sees songwriting as a game for herself—a chance to fixate on hyper-specific memories for the fun of it. The expelling and processing comes later. In the meantime, she writes lines like “Toss me out with the water / Toss me out if you can / I know I’m tougher to swallow / Always slip out of your hands.” I’d say it’s a pretty cool trade-off, even when she remembers that the subjects of her songs might hear the words she’s written one day. “It’s like, ‘Lol, this person is gonna know exactly what I’m talking about, because I’m talking about them on this day at this place and they know that because I said it,’” she continues. “But I think that’s cool, and I think that people appreciate it. It’s only embarrassing for me, and that’s fine.”

Watch Odie Leigh’s Paste Session at our 2024 East Austin Block Party below.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.