Kiran Leonard: “21st century folk music is webcam balladeers”

When you hear Kiran Leonard’s “Dear Lincoln” for the first time – all Elephant 6 collective, Daniel Johnston, psych folk, lo-fi and kind of shambolic – you’re left wondering what underground, cultish US act is responsible for such brilliance. So, to find out it was written when Leonard – a native of Oldham, Lancs. – was just 14 years old is something of a shock to the system, and enough to send anyone older into a jealous rage. And it doesn’t stop there; at only 18, Leonard’s discography is swelling, including impressive debut Bowler Hat Soup.

Sixteen sprawling tracks long and fifty-odd minutes of unhinged brilliance, it’s quite a way to introduce yourself to the world. Inspired by the Mothers of Invention, Sufjan Stevens, Penderecki, Albert Ayler, Don Cabellero, Godspeed and The Beach Boys it’s almost too much to get a grip of on just one listen. From the woozy country of “Whisky Bath”, through the gorgeous mandolin and keys wheeze of “Port Aine” to the sound collage of “There’s No Future In Us” and the tear-stained organ closer “A Purpose’” there’s so much depth (before we even get to Leonard’s fascinating vocal yelps and stream-of-consciousness lyrics) and variety it’s verging on the unbelievable that it was written before he was even out of school.

With all this in mind, how could Best Fit pass up the opportunity to find out more about Kiran Leonard? After agreeing that a boring email Q&A wasn’t the way to go, I dialled up Kiran on a drab weekday evening for a Skype video chat and despite not wanting to mention his age, that’s pretty much where I end up starting…

I say to Kiran that we should begin with the question of his age, just to get it out of the way…so I ask if it bothers that people seem so amazed/concerned/fascinated at him making such a brilliant record at a relatively young age: “I dunno; I don’t think anyone listens to things for pleasure just based on the circumstances under which it was made,” says Kiran. “If you can’t appreciate it for an objective piece of work – whether or not it was made by someone who’s 16 or in their 50s or whatever – people aren’t going to enjoy it if it’s completely decontextualised…but if people like it for that, then that’s nice, you know?” Fine. That’s that sorted. Moving swiftly on, I decide we should start at the beginning, so at what age did Leonard start to play and write music? “I started playing about 4 or 5, on a mandolin,” he begins, reaching behind him to show me the mandolin on which he started playing, “mainly because my hands weren’t big enough to play guitar properly! Then I started playing guitar when I was 8, and the first things I wrote around then were short, melodic things on the mandolin…and I’ve just continued to write.” And does Kiran still use the mandolin in his recordings? “Yes, absolutely,” he affirms, adding: “Comparatively, that’s more of a classical discipline for me than the other instruments. I do concertos for college and things like that, but I’m not an extremely disciplined five-hours-a-day kind of mandolin player…I play classical pieces on it, whereas I don’t do that with piano and guitar. That’s more me kind of auto-didactically weaving my way through the instrument, really.”

The bio for Leonard and Bowler Hat Soup suggests that there’s twenty-plus instruments on the album, so is it really true that the teenager has turned his hand to so many instruments? “The number is sort of gimmicky really,” reveals Kiran. That includes if I strike a radiator or something…but mandolin is the only instrument I’ve had regular lessons on really. I’ve never had proper guitar lessons…though I have one music lesson a week with a private instructor, mostly mandolin and occasionally piano, but we don’t do…we mostly just talk really!” I ask if Kiran comes from a fairly musical family, and it’s hardly a surprise that he does: “I’ve got three brothers who all play guitar,” he admits, “so you could say it’s self-taught as I’ve not had lessons but I’m in an environment where everyone plays…” Does that include his parents? “My dad plays the guitar; he used to play professionally in the 70s and 80s but now he works in radio production.”

Another part of Leonard’s bio which fascinates is the list of his influences; some you might expect from a teenager, other more obscure ones you wonder where a 13-year-old might have come across them. So where did Kiran get his excellent musical taste from? “My brother, mainly,” he begins. “When I was 10 he loaded the contents of his iPod on to my computer from which the most long-lasting influences were The Mars Volta, Boards of Canada, Shellac, Melt Banana, Boredoms…also bands like Pelican - he was really into that intricate, instrumental, heavy, post-metal. Using that as a starting point and information from cyberspace I just branched out, really!”

The mention of a band like Boredoms interests me as there are moments on Bowler Hat Soup, such as recent single “Dear Lincoln”, that are extremely percussive and noisy. Does Kiran use more than one drummer when playing live? “Yeah we play with two drummers!” he reveals. He then explains: “That’s one of those things that needs to work really well, though. Occasionally if we’re under-rehearsed …you need to be so interlocked with two drummers!” It turns out, though, that the use of extra percussion comes out of necessity. Kiran expands: “The idea behind that is, basically, I have to take pieces that have twelve or thirteen instruments on them and boil them down into a group arrangement that’s feasible to perform live. Normally when we play the pieces we replace the tonal diversity with brutality, really, so it’s just very loud – we belt it out instead. But we don’t play live as a band very often, that’s a format I’m still working with… I do more solo shows really; band stuff is still a work in progress.”

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It feels like Bowler Hat Soup has been around for a while now. The album was finally released last November, but I’ve been living with its brilliance since before the summer of last year, and its existence goes back even further than that. Kiran takes up the story: “Yeah, it’s had a bit of an odd gestation! The material is two years old; I started recording it in June 2010, just before I turned 15, and finished it in November 2011 and mixed it with my brother by January 2012 and a few months after that I was contacted by Hand of Glory who said they’d like to release it.” So why the delay? “What happened is, it was initially going to be released in October 2012,” explains Leonard, “but they were putting out Mary ’s album so we had to postpone it for a bit. I got involved with a PR person and was initially going to release it in August, but then a distribution company got interested. So instead of a limited edition vinyl it became a limited edition double record and a general release CD…so the process has gotten more extensive.” Kiran leaps up from his desk and disappears for a moment, before returning with a finished copy of his album: “Actually, I got the promo CD through today,” he says, showing off the artwork. I ask if he’s responsible for the artwork: No, no it’s done by a woman called Kelly Adams,” says Kiran, “a fantastic kind of surrealist – she’s done a really nice black and white gatefold drawing in the middle of it, and it has a lyric sheet for every song.”

I mention that the artwork, especially inside around the lyrics, reminds me of the art for a Pavement record. Kiran nods, and begins to explain why he feels artwork for a release is so important: “I think the artwork is really important; I have a few people who message me on the internet, or come to my shows, and they’re like ‘oh I really like your recording, I ripped it off YouTube and I feel really bad! I deleted it and I swear I’m going to buy it’.” Does that bother him? “I kind of don’t mind really; I think piracy is great…if you’re in a situation where you don’t have any money and you’re trying to pay the bills or whatever, and you want to listen to my record and don’t have the money to buy it, just steal it, that’s fine! That’s an atmosphere that I’m okay with and it’s mutually beneficial, but it means when you create a physical product for someone to buy you need to say, you’re not just buying a CD, it has amazing artwork by a really talented artist and a booklet I’ve spent ages putting together…it’s like owning a piece of art rather than just a record. Like, if I buy a CD and it’s just front cover, back cover and you open it up and it’s just a picture in the middle of the CD, I’m really, really pissed off! Why did I pay for this? I could just….”

As we discuss the distribution of music in the 21st century, we end up talking about how the passing on and consumption of music varies in different cultures: “It’s weird how certain strands of culture consume music differently,” says Kiran. “Like, you get things in Western Africa where the main source of distribution of music is memory cards into mobile phones, and that’s because the primary music player in that part of Africa is mobile phones…” I say that you could probably explain that by tracing a line between the culture of the spoken word and the way that songs were shared in the oral traditions, much like folk music in this country. “Yeah I was thinking about that before, particularly the relevance of folk music now, says Kiran. “It’s something that’s always been about really, and I was thinking about groups like – I don’t know – Mumford & Sons for example; the integrity of their music aside – it’s irrelevant what I think of them – but whether it takes away from what folk music is, which it does, because it doesn’t stem from the oral tradition. Whereas, actually, a teenager singing Beyoncé songs into a webcam microphone is actually more in the vein of the folk tradition…which I think is kind of cool, really. I thought that was funny, anyway. 21st century folk music is webcam balladeers.”

Returning to the extended gestation of Bowler Hat Soup, its release now coincides with Leonard taking his A-levels and preparing for university – he hopes to study Spanish and Portuguese. Sticking with university and its impact, I ask Kiran how this change will affect his music – not just in a practical sense, but in terms of how his music sounds, moving from quiet countryside to the city and all that brings with it. Kiran admits he’s unsure about that: “I dunno really; when you’re making stuff you kind of just work with your surroundings. At the moment I’m lucky enough to live in an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere, which means I can record drums and everything at home and there’s no kind of issue with noise pollution. But obviously when I move out next year I won’t have that benefit…I kind of look at that more as an interesting change of environment.” Has he thought that far ahead as yet? “It doesn’t mean that I have to stop doing things,” says Kiran, “or if I devote all my time to this it doesn’t mean I have to stop – for example, because I’ve got so much work going on at the moment as I’m recording the follow-up to this record at the moment, but I’m also recording…like, I make live recordings occasionally or the odd song that I give to compilations, and I’m also making a completely solo electric guitar record at the moment.” But there doesn’t appear to be any effects of pressure on Leonard. He explains: “Instead of being pressurised by time I’m trying to utilise it and make things that are not…inferior but take up less time, so no overdubs, solo recordings, things like that.”

Indeed, there appears to be so little pressure on Kiran that he’s working on not one, but two new records at the moment: “The one I’m recording that’s the follow-up to Bowler Hat Soup, that’s called Grapefruit; it’s the same length…the vast majority of songs on BHS were recorded on piano, and this one is mostly guitar music. The songs are longer as well: the whole album is the same length but there are seven tracks instead of sixteen. Rather than cramming a shitload of stuff into it, it’s more about longer, larger…” So will we, many years down the line, have more of a varied and unclassifiable discography? Kiran agrees: “I put out a lot of recordings really, so the way my discography works it doesn’t really work like one parallel. There’s one chronology of main projects which would be The Big Fish, Bowler Hat Soup, Grapefruit but alongside that we’ve got side projects, live recordings or acoustic-only recordings…so the record I’m recording at the moment that’s just electric guitar, that’s not a follow-up to anything, it’s just something else.” I ask if Kiran has to keep recording and writing, rather than have to face everyday life. Unsure at first, he tentatively agrees: “I don’t know…well, yeah actually I suppose! It’s just like skiing or painting isn’t it? Going back to Shellac, that’s the way Steve Albini puts it. It’s something you sit down and do because you haven’t got anything else to do, or it’s something that’s fulfilling. There’s also something quite fetishistic and nice about building a large output of recordings without being too liberal about what you put out…like, obviously having a threshold where you don’t put out shit…I don’t know, it’s just thinking about different ways to do things I guess?”

With Kiran’s own take on recording and releasing, I say that given the way albums are released from nowhere, or like Arcade Fire’s most recent effort teased for weeks on end, it really does free him up – or anyone else for that matter – to experiment with how he releases any music. But rather than delve into that. Kiran lights up at the mention of Win Butler and co: “I’m quite looking forward to that one, actually,” he says. “I think it’s because they’ve dropped the whole summer camp, drums-by-their-hip laaaaaaa….which I think is great. My favourite record of theirs is probably Neon Bible but what’s the point of going on if you’re just gonna make another record like Neon Bible? May as well go and make a disco album with James Murphy – you know, why not? Fuck it, it’s a great idea.”

Bowler Hat Soup is out now on Hand Of Glory. Kiran’s upcoming shows include a slot at the BBC 6Music Festival in Manchester, in support of the National.