Metro Pulse/Music/Leslie Woods

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What:
Leslie Woods, with Jennifer Nicely and Kat Brock

When:
Saturday, July 27

Where:
Blue Cats

XX Factor
Jucifer won't bend over for anyone

Leslie Woods isn't dark—she just sings that way.

by Jesse Fox Mayshark

Leslie Woods is lounging on a couch in the cozy living room of her East Knox County home, one leg resting idly on her husband Jeff's lap.

"When Jeff and I got married," she says, "I said, 'You know, of all the things we could give our future kids, I would like for them to be able to look back and remember us sitting on the porch, singing.'"

They have the kids now—Benjamin, 4, and Jake, 2. And they have the porch, a deck along the front of their farmhouse that looks out on a small horse pasture. The one thing different from Woods' original conception is that some of the songs they sit out there singing are hers.

A few months ago, the 37-year-old former punk rocker, who grew up in Fort Sanders and remembers dancing to the Dead Kennedys at 15, released one of this year's most striking local recordings. Velvet Sky, a self-produced eight-song CD (nine if you count the nifty "hidden" track at the end), is a collection of dark neo-country ballads that legitimately qualify for the clichéd adjective "haunting." Backed by a crackerjack assortment of local musicians (including guitar legend Terry Hill, and Jeff Woods on bass), Woods lends her husky twang to tales of betrayal, desire and hard-won joy.

The songs were a long time in gestation. Woods grew up surrounded by music. Her father, a UT paleontologist, was a classical music and opera buff who was also prone to strumming Carter Family songs on his acoustic guitar. Her mother was a painter and rock 'n' roll fan, who went on to run the long-since-vanished club Bogie's on Cumberland Avenue during Leslie's teen years. There was a constant stream of students and guests from all over the world through the Woods' home.

"Being in Fort Sanders was like being in a small town," Woods says of her adolescence, "and we did small-town stuff—get high and climb on top of the elementary school and ring that bell, and then talk about it for five days."

Although she at one time sported a spiky purple mohawk, by the time she met her future husband, her musical interests were already turning in other directions. She found herself drawn to traditional mountain music and classic country, and when Jeff bought her a guitar for Christmas seven years ago, that's what she set out to learn. Lugging the Gibson J-45 to folk and bluegrass jams throughout Knox County, she slowly overcame shyness about playing and singing. She would go out to the Ciderville Music Barn and sing Patsy Cline songs like "I Fall to Pieces."

Then one night, while sitting in her room playing with chord changes on the guitar, some words came into her head. "I've always written short stories and poetry, just anything that comes to mind," she says. "I started messing around and playing something, and I thought, 'Wow, I just made that up.'"

More followed. She played them for Jeff, who helped translate them for full-band arrangements. Her melodies sound straightforward, but they're laced with unusual chord structures. "She does all kinds of crazy stuff," Jeff says with a laugh. "But somehow it works.... It's what's so exciting about her songs. It's talent and creativity and it's pure. It's like she's channeling something."

Wherever the songs come from, it must be a kind of spooky place. Although some of them are expressions of love and contentment, they're always tinged with shadow. There's a gothic tone to much of it, with a hard Appalachian edge.

"People are always on my ass about, 'You need to write some more upbeat stuff,'" Leslie says. She shrugs. "The problem with that is I have absolutely no control over what comes out... I'm no darker than any other person on earth, probably. But I'm an open book. Whatever I'm feeling comes out of my mouth."

Jeff compares the feel of Velvet Sky to other "alone-in-the-car-at-night records," like Emmylou Harris' Wrecking Ball. "It wasn't written to have your morning coffee with," he says. "It was written to get you from Lafayette, Louisiana, to Mobile, Alabama from midnight to 4 in the morning."

Or, maybe, to give you something to sing on the back porch as the sun goes down.