Winterfest 2018: Four Destinations Records, Friday, Dec. 14, 5 to 10 p.m. at The Pipe Shop. For more details visit fourdestinations.com.
She stood alone at the microphone.
Like many who choose to brave the spotlight and cast off the shackles of everyday drudgery in favour of the power of performance, Leo says getting up there to belt out a song wasn’t so much a choice as something she just had to do.
“Music was the one thing I was sure of, it was the one escape I had from all my anxieties,” she says. “It was the one place I felt safe to do what I love.”
The 19-year-old pop singer, who performs as Leo but is also known as Amy Williams, describes moving from Toronto to North Vancouver when she was 14, followed by a chance open mic encounter at 15 at a café in Lower Lonsdale where she ended up connecting with Liam Sturgess of the North Shore-based Four Destinations Records.
“Everything I know about music I’ve learned from working with Four Destinations,” says Leo. “I think because I started out when I was so young – I was 15 when I met them and I didn’t really know anything about the music industry or producing or anything like that and it was just me and my guitar – and now I know how to produce music.”
At 16, Leo released her debut record, TIDXLS, through Four Destinations. After a brief interlude, her considerably more polished follow up, Saints, was released earlier this year.
“My goal with Saints was to update people with where I was at musically. I wanted to show how I’d changed as an artist and how I’d evolved,” she says. “I wanted more of a mature sound to reflect how I’d grown as a person.”
Concert goers will be able to see that maturation in action at Winterfest 2018 tonight (Dec. 14), a celebration of Four Destinations’ successes over the last calendar year featuring a bevy of artists such as Landmark 20, tyler skyy, Liam Sturgess, and Leo as headliners.
“We’ve had a lot of releases throughout the year and a lot of success with interacting with the community and working with children especially, because the studio does lessons,” says Leo, adding that many North Shore indie, pop, hip-hop and underground artists are working tirelessly as they form their own local scene. “I think that we’re trying to get our name out there more. I think the big music community for underground artists right now is East Van. … We’re trying to work here and get our name out there as well. It’s definitely emerging, and stuff like Winterfest helps play into us trying to get our name out there and having a lot of local artists come together to perform.”
Leo says she’ll be performing songs off Saints during her Winterfest set, an album that borrows from hip-hop and indie pop and features the production work of Alex Balanko, who she credits with teaching her more about cutting tracks and “what goes into writing a good song that people want to listen to.”
The album’s leadoff song, “No Shame,” was inspired by Drake’s megahit “Passionfruit” and its “Chill beat” vibe, explains Leo.
And while Leo, who’s studying English at Capilano University as she pursues her music career, is now a multi-faceted musician who channels diverse genres and intricate production techniques, her obsession with music started simply with an acoustic guitar accompanied by her lone voice.
“I started writing and playing guitar when I was about eight. Pretty much from when I was eight to 15 it was just me and my guitar,” she says, adding that from a young age she had pop ambitions. “The real answer to that is I was obsessed with Hannah Montana and I wanted to be just like her when I was eight years old. … I took out a Taylor Swift chord book from the library and I learned how to play chords in the back of that. It’s super embarrassing but it’s the truth.”
That truth paid off. Leo, who adds that she’ll be recording under a new name when she release an EP of new music early next year, is completely self-taught. But as her music has evolved with age and experience, so has the depth of her songwriting, perhaps most evident on one of her favourite tracks off Saints, “Drive Me Wild.”
“I lost a friend to suicide last September. That song was inspired by her so I really connect to that when I perform it,” says Leo. “It’s about wanting to have one moment with someone and appreciating the time spent with someone, because when you’re spending time with people a lot of the time you kind of disassociate and you don’t really appreciate what you have while you have it.”
