Music Spotlight: Leila Sunier
Singer-songwriter Leila Sunier began her career while in the third grade, singing in church before the flocks of believers. She cultivated the early seeds of her musical style listening to classic country at home, absorbing the stories, with a dose of swing jazz on Saturday nights, and 80’s metal bands while on family road trips. By 14, she began writing her own songs. She describes herself as reserved and shy, often sprinkling her writing with words that can only be quarried by the absorption of books and studies, but such suppositions ebb away when she hits the stage before live audiences and uses her four-octave dynamic range to amalgamate the common threads between her recorded music and her live sets. When it comes to Leila, her songs are her conversations, and she tells her story by allowing others to hear their own as they join in the experience. Leila is also a visual artist, and she takes the same approach to her visual works like her music, presenting a cohesive body that encompasses a whole. Somewhat of a modern gypsie, she’s sojourned through Chicago, New York, the SF Bay Area, Miami and Colorado, the latter which she now calls home. But it’s in the expansive desert lands of Los Angeles where she’s driven a stake to claim the next journey of her musical career. With her own acrylic painting on the cover of her debut album, If Only to Bleed Out the White Noise, Leila delivers a compendium of layered melodies that are ethereal + dreamy. From the echoing haunting chorus in Let Me, to the thumping drums and base of A Little Longer, instilling the reverberating crispy string noise in Ghost, psychedelic whispers in Cut a Smile, the hazy ethereal layers of Young Thing, and finishing the experience with a demonstration of her full vocal range in Could Be, she demonstrates her creativity and potential. We caught up with Leila, who’s already in the process of working on a follow up project + wrapping up the score for two upcoming short films.
words + interview by AJ Gutierrez
photo by Alice Kim
Asymmetric Magazine: Congrats on your recent EP If Only to Bleed Out the White Noise! Can you tell us the story behind it?
Leila Sunier: Thanks! There are actually a couple of stories running through the project. The songs themselves span a couple of years in writing, though the actual recording and arrangement of the EP was pretty quick. When the project was finally coming together, I was going through this pretty transitional period where I was about to graduate from college and had just ended a pretty serious relationship. I think I was truly reckoning with these ideas of commitment, responsibility, guilt, and pain. All of those concepts are really just a part of growing up, which is what the penultimate song Young Thing is about. It’s also the song where the title of the EP derives from.
AM: Are there any consistent themes you typically pursue through your music?
LS: I think I tend to gravitate towards lyrical themes and concepts that really dissect one's relationship to their environment and the people around them. It’s a very reactionary style of writing. I grew up on old country, so the story of a song and the lyrics behind it are incredibly important to me. It’s also important that I feel like I’ve shared my story but allowed the space for others to hear their own.
It’s important that I feel like I’ve shared my story but allowed the space for others to hear their own.
AM: For first time listeners, how would you describe your music and style?
LS: Extremely emotionally charged. I not only grew up on country music, but musical theater and hard rock as well, so perhaps that’s why I love a good melodrama. I love a good story. I think that dynamic range is the common thread between my recorded sound and my live set. I’ve yet to figure out how to truly incorporate the electronic elements of my music into my performance, which is a goal of mine, but what I think rings true in my recordings and my set, be it full band or acoustic, is I’m going to deliver that emotion.
photo courtesy of the artist
AM: Speaking of your live sets, congrats on your show at The Hotel Cafe last month, too! Do you have a favorite track to play live?
LS: Thank you! I don’t know if I necessarily have a favorite, but I do love playing Cut A Smile when I get the chance with a full band. It’s such a cathartic release of energy, being able to perform a song like that. What I love about that song is that I get to challenge the audience as to their perception of me. I’m typically pretty reserved, but performing allows me to channel every aspect of myself, even the parts that aren’t so quiet and polite. As a woman in this industry, there’s a lot to be angry about half of the time. Cut a Smile gives me the space to be exactly that.
AM: You’re also a visual artist; can you speak to the kind of art you create?
LS: Recently, I’ve been creating extremely relaxed, fluid, acrylic paintings. There’s actually a series of paintings that I’ve done in conjunction with the EP rollout that have been released as accelerated videos on YouTube. Each painting is an abstract representation either for the official video’s set or for what I mentally picture when I talk about the song. For the official EP art, I created a series of nude women in gold. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you exactly what prompted that series, other than I was gravitated towards certain colors and the human figure at the time. As is the case with my music, I like to present cohesive bodies of work that could all fit into a single series.
If Only to Bleed Out the White Noise cover art
AM: How does your visual art complement your musical style?
LS: My paintings are extremely relaxed and impressionistic. I don’t gravitate towards concrete imagery. I prefer art that is suggestive and doesn’t reveal the whole picture. I think my music is incredibly similar.
AM: What other musicians are you currently listening to? Do they influence your sound?
LS: I’m in love with the new Andy Shauf record. I love the conversationalist style of his lyric writing, and I love the stories he creates. I was also listening to the new Tame Impala project the other day, and, as usual, was in awe of his sound design and production ideas. On a smaller scale, there’s this band RitaRita that just blows me away. They do this modern tango between psychedelic rock and free-flowing jazz that’s just beautiful and challenging and raw. You should check out the album Savta’s Garden. It’s gorgeous. As a songwriter and producer, I think you can’t help but be influenced by the music of your peers. It’s only natural. Not only that, it’s your job to be a sponge and then ring out what doesn’t agree with you. Whatever’s left becomes a tool in your kit.
As a songwriter and producer, I think you can’t help but be influenced by the music of your peers. It’s only natural. Not only that, it’s your job to be a sponge and then ring out what doesn’t agree with you. Whatever’s left becomes a tool in your kit.
AM: What's something outside of music and visual art that inspires you?
LS: Film. I grew up on old cinema and certainly had that phase in high school and college where I was a complete snob for art house films. Withnail and I remains my favorite dark comedy of all time. I don’t have the patience for television, but there certainly are some series that have left an imprint on me, even if I haven’t finished it all the way through!
AM: Does Los Angeles play a role in your music or approach as an artist?
LS: I’m a pretty recent transplant to Los Angeles, so I can’t say, and I still split my time pretty healthily between here and Colorado. It certainly has made me more aware as to what I want to present in my art and what I don’t. It’s even challenged me in what I want to present visually. I think if you listen to my music, you’ll understand pretty quickly that I’m not interested in trends and I’m not interested in portraying two-dimensional characters or storylines. But it’s a great opportunity because there are so many creatives focused on their craft in this city whose skill sets and needs overlap. I have some wonderful people, old and new, that I get the privilege of calling friends and co-workers out here. I think it’s important to learn who you want to spend your time with, and for me, I’m still learning.
photo by Michael Greenburg
AM: What can we expect from you next?
LS: I’m currently working on a follow up project. I’m a little bit of a perfectionist and like it when I can present a clear thesis, so sometimes it takes a little more time. We’ve transitioned into a singles era, but I still love it when you can listen to a project, be it four songs or fifteen songs, and it plays like a book with all these different chapters and characters and threads running through it. Recently, the parts are starting to come together and I’m getting pretty excited about it. I’m also finishing up scoring these two short films. I’m thrilled and honored to be on both projects. Scoring is this wonderful avenue of creativity where you as the composer are looking to serve the picture and support emotion that is already there, or maybe just hinted at. It’s amazing and extremely rewarding in a different way from contemporary music. So yeah, I’m pretty excited about what’s next.
