Robert Leslie
Halfway Home
Independent
2022
Robert Leslie should be a household name. Halfway Home is his fourth album, yet for the most part, his name has been made on the streets of New York. Leslie is by and large a street performer, busking for bucks. Although he’s spent time in Spain, Morocco, France and Holland, New York became his city of choice, travelling there with just the clothes on his back since everything he owned was stolen from the laundromat just before his flight.
In some ways, his chosen route towards success doesn’t make any sense at all; Halfway Home was produced by one of music’s heaviest hitters, Perry Margouleff, who recommended that Tony Garnier play bass and Scarlett Rivera (both Bob Dylan veterans) added violin to the proceedings. Not exactly the kind of musicians who would be playing on a street performer’s album. But Leslie is no ordinary street performer. He announces his shows and their location on Instagram and begins an hour and a half before sunset, the twilight glow framing the scene and the sounds.
Leslie’s songs, fragile gems, reveal new facets with each listen. Nothing feels out of place, from acoustic guitars to shimmering synths, yet there are enough sounds that keep things from being nothing more than background music. There is an almost Beatle-ish mellotron to “In Another Light,” with Leslie adding the heartfelt refrain, “Better take our time to keep our loving on the line till it comes around/ And you’ll see me soon with a different tune in another light.”
Guitar and drums take the lead on “Years Away,” yet the keyboards of Jake Sinclair add incredibly to a tune that speaks to the way things change over time. “Always rush to raise the bet/ The stakes are never set/So take the words from out my mouth before I bank it/ I’m whiling out the time behind this truth/ But here’s another tune/ It’s funny how I’m old enough to say/ I was years and years away.” What we learn over time changes everything we look at, making one realise all we know and all we don’t.
Scarlet Rivera’s violin adds an incredible sense of melancholy to “Halfway Home.” The song deals with the nature of what it means at the midpoint to be “standing in the gateway halfway home.” Margouleff once again shows why he is such an important element as a producer, never overplaying his hand, creating a framework highlighting subtle shadings.
In one sense, it’s an incredible shame that Robert Leslie ends up selling Halfway Home at shows in the parks of New York. Sometimes one just wants to keep an artist to himself, not because Leslie doesn’t deserve a much larger audience; clearly, he does. Yet, at this particular moment, I’m ready to run off to New York and see Leslie in the park while I still can. It won’t always be that way.
Halfway Home is out now.
You can hear Robert Leslie in the latest Lost in Transmission Show: