LA songwriter Cameron Leahy has shared his indie-folk masterpiece in Dizzy Freedom, available to stream now on all DPSs worldwide. The album evokes a nomadic existence — wanderers moving across the desert, through the muggy south, up the coast and back into a vision of an ocean town mirage. This haunting American landscape comes into glittering focus like a night sky, and the characters in Leahy’s songs transmit ghostly guidance across a modern twilight zone.
“The unmoved, who moved it?/ I touched on something new/ It’s up to you.” 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.
“When Dizzy Freedom emerged originally I just assumed it was an amalgam of words I’d noticed somewhere,” Leahy says. “It made me think about going on a wisdom quest, being out in an alien landscape and trying to pick up transmissions from beyond. I liked that it could be a phrase or a character’s name. There is a famous concept from Kierkegaard called the ‘dizziness of freedom,’ and that definitely must have seeped in too, my hallucinatory memory distorting it.”
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. The album, which at moments evokes the craft of artists like Neil Young and The Kinks, playfully twists the form into new territory, 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.”
Adding this one to the rotation?
