Will Leet Interview
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: I’ve been singing ever since I can remember. I took up piano at an early age, and guitar followed in middle school or so. I fell in love with the Beatles in 7th grade and was inspired to start writing songs and form my own band in high school. That zest carried through to college, when I started to take songwriting a little more seriously. It probably took 50 mediocre songs to get my first really good one. But when you’re a kid, you don’t have that critic in your head, so you just keep going. I moved to the city in 2013 at age 22 to start my professional music career. A lot of those early days involved playing kids music and performing in the corner of dimly lit sports bars. Eventually I found my people, and started to grow as a musician through collaboration. In 2015, my college friend and collaborator, Chris Burns and I had a pivotal moment when we decided to take our writing and recording to the next level. The result was my debut EP (under the moniker “Instant Treeline”) released in 2016. Over the next few years I recorded and produced an EP and an album with indie rock group, AOFine, and I joined Sammy Rae & the Friends as keyboardist / guitarist. Chris and I continued to write over those four years and finally amassed enough material to make a full length LP. In 2020, I got up the guts to launch a Kickstarter to fund the project, and the album Come Back Roses was born!
Q: What inspired you to make Come Back Roses? The name resonates with me and points to the way a lot of people feel these days.
A: It started as a collection of what I considered the best songs Chris and I wrote in our 20s. A real coming-of-age time. As I approached 30, I had a strong inclination to get these songs recorded permanently. An indelible document of an era. Nothing more than a record of the songs that we wrote, came to love and performed for years. They all started taking on lives of their own–so we just had to capture them. When the pandemic hit, creating this album became my sole purpose in life for a while. If the world would never be the same, at least I had this little thing that I could grow and protect. The concept of the title Come Back Roses is rebirth after loss. Hope that the simple joys in life will return again.
Q: Can you talk about some of the themes on the album?
A: An overarching theme is navigating the end of romantic relationships and the beginning of new ones. Some songs are about imposter syndrome. That feeling that you’re not good enough, or that you’re some sort of hack job. We ponder our own mortality in “Satan & the Sailor,” and “Rainbow,” too. To sum it up: love, loss, self-doubt, death and rebirth.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: Most of the time I’ll have a little melody or chord progression on acoustic guitar and piano, and I’ll bring it to Chris. He’ll seemingly pull the words out of a hat to fit the vibe of what I’m playing. We’ll conjure up a concept together and from then on it’s like solving a puzzle. We’ll finish each other's sentences and we’ll sing it over and over again until it sounds like a song. Next we record it on the phone, and I’ll make several demos in my home studio. Eventually we’d bring the songs to a band and in this case, perform them live for years before actually professionally recording it.
Q: Can you talk about your musical history?
A: I’ve been singing ever since I can remember. I took up piano at an early age, and guitar followed in middle school or so. I fell in love with the Beatles in 7th grade and was inspired to start writing songs and form my own band in high school. That zest carried through to college, when I started to take songwriting a little more seriously. It probably took 50 mediocre songs to get my first really good one. But when you’re a kid, you don’t have that critic in your head, so you just keep going. I moved to the city in 2013 at age 22 to start my professional music career. A lot of those early days involved playing kids music and performing in the corner of dimly lit sports bars. Eventually I found my people, and started to grow as a musician through collaboration. In 2015, my college friend and collaborator, Chris Burns and I had a pivotal moment when we decided to take our writing and recording to the next level. The result was my debut EP (under the moniker “Instant Treeline”) released in 2016. Over the next few years I recorded and produced an EP and an album with indie rock group, AOFine, and I joined Sammy Rae & the Friends as keyboardist / guitarist. Chris and I continued to write over those four years and finally amassed enough material to make a full length LP. In 2020, I got up the guts to launch a Kickstarter to fund the project, and the album Come Back Roses was born!
Q: What inspired you to make Come Back Roses? The name resonates with me and points to the way a lot of people feel these days.
A: It started as a collection of what I considered the best songs Chris and I wrote in our 20s. A real coming-of-age time. As I approached 30, I had a strong inclination to get these songs recorded permanently. An indelible document of an era. Nothing more than a record of the songs that we wrote, came to love and performed for years. They all started taking on lives of their own–so we just had to capture them. When the pandemic hit, creating this album became my sole purpose in life for a while. If the world would never be the same, at least I had this little thing that I could grow and protect. The concept of the title Come Back Roses is rebirth after loss. Hope that the simple joys in life will return again.
Q: Can you talk about some of the themes on the album?
A: An overarching theme is navigating the end of romantic relationships and the beginning of new ones. Some songs are about imposter syndrome. That feeling that you’re not good enough, or that you’re some sort of hack job. We ponder our own mortality in “Satan & the Sailor,” and “Rainbow,” too. To sum it up: love, loss, self-doubt, death and rebirth.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: Most of the time I’ll have a little melody or chord progression on acoustic guitar and piano, and I’ll bring it to Chris. He’ll seemingly pull the words out of a hat to fit the vibe of what I’m playing. We’ll conjure up a concept together and from then on it’s like solving a puzzle. We’ll finish each other's sentences and we’ll sing it over and over again until it sounds like a song. Next we record it on the phone, and I’ll make several demos in my home studio. Eventually we’d bring the songs to a band and in this case, perform them live for years before actually professionally recording it.
Q: What was your recording process like? And has it changed over the years? Would you explain some of the tools you use?
A: We got the bones of all the tracks (drums, bass, acoustic guitar, grand piano) down to tape at Dreamland Recording Studios in Kingston, NY. The tape (and the large live room at Dreamland) gave the songs a natural warmth and radiance right away. I also loved the limitation of tape, in that we HAD to commit to a single live performance right then and there. THAT is really the heart of the sound. Everything else that followed was overdubbed in ProTools across five different studios in NY, CT, and CA over the course of two years. We worked with as many as 25 different musicians to bring these songs to life. Vocals were the trickiest part–I couldn’t be confined to an hourly studio for it, so I worked at a relaxed pace in a friends’ closet in California to get the vibe right.
Q: How do you usually go about writing lyrics?
A: My writing partner Chris plays a big hand in sparking the heart of the lyrical content for these songs. Once we have a concept, we try to tell the story as simply as possible. The fewer the words, the harder it is, but the greater the reward. We want everything to be candid and conversational.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
A: The music itself is multi-genre spanning because of my love of ALL music. It’s mainly rock, folk, country, bluegrass and pop. Each song specializes in storytelling–and every story has a different combination of sonic ingredients to authentically deliver it. My biggest influences here are the Beatles, Kacey Musgraves, Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson.
A: We got the bones of all the tracks (drums, bass, acoustic guitar, grand piano) down to tape at Dreamland Recording Studios in Kingston, NY. The tape (and the large live room at Dreamland) gave the songs a natural warmth and radiance right away. I also loved the limitation of tape, in that we HAD to commit to a single live performance right then and there. THAT is really the heart of the sound. Everything else that followed was overdubbed in ProTools across five different studios in NY, CT, and CA over the course of two years. We worked with as many as 25 different musicians to bring these songs to life. Vocals were the trickiest part–I couldn’t be confined to an hourly studio for it, so I worked at a relaxed pace in a friends’ closet in California to get the vibe right.
Q: How do you usually go about writing lyrics?
A: My writing partner Chris plays a big hand in sparking the heart of the lyrical content for these songs. Once we have a concept, we try to tell the story as simply as possible. The fewer the words, the harder it is, but the greater the reward. We want everything to be candid and conversational.
Q: What else should we know about your music?
A: The music itself is multi-genre spanning because of my love of ALL music. It’s mainly rock, folk, country, bluegrass and pop. Each song specializes in storytelling–and every story has a different combination of sonic ingredients to authentically deliver it. My biggest influences here are the Beatles, Kacey Musgraves, Grateful Dead and Willie Nelson.