Indie/folk songwriter Cameron Leahy has shared his ethereal future folk track and music video, “Critic.” The song will be featured on Leahy’s debut full-length solo album, Dizzy Freedom, due out on June 7th. “Critic” focuses on finding clarity in chaos, taking your own advice, laughing at the absurd, and not taking life too seriously. It encourages you to live free of fear and take life as it comes.
“I’m not sure what songs are about when I’m writing them,” Leahy says. “There isn’t much of a process. I don’t really want to understand if there is a process. I sing, the guitar follows. I write stuff down that sounds good to me. Say what you feel. Lately, I think ‘Critic’ is kind of about that. Accept the risks and take the plunge. Remind your friends to remain wide-eyed in a disorienting and often unsympathetic world.”
Leahy’s blend of indie rock and folk evokes a nomadic existence — wanderers moving across the desert, through the muggy south, up the coast “past oil rigs in the mist” and back into a vision of an ocean town mirage. On his forthcoming debut solo album, Dizzy Freedom, this haunting American landscape comes into glittering focus like a night sky. The characters in Leahy’s songs transmit ghostly guidance across this modern twilight zone. It’s an apt mission statement for an artist writing songs that could just as easily have been dug up from the distant past as beamed in from a future traveler.
Dizzy Freedom was self-produced by Leahy in his southern California studio. It’s an intimate and equally expansive collection of songs from the gifted songwriter who started his career in the Virginia-based band, The Downtown Fiction, before beginning to write and self-produce in Los Angeles under his own moniker. At moments indebted to the craft of artists like Neil Young and The Kinks, while reimagining what it means to make music for a digital age, Leahy could just as easily be remarking on his own journey when he observes in the closing lines of “Monterey”: “Find yourself and you’re free.”
What do you think of Cameron Leahy’s “Critic”?
