“I’m never going to not write a coming-of-age record” - Leith Ross explores their latest album, ‘I Can See The Future’
On September 19th, the Winnipeg-based artist Leith Ross released their sophomore studio album, with its distinctive sound of vulnerability, yearning and connection that Leith has become known for in their work.
Since their debut single in 2020 and viral track, We’ll Never Have Sex that became a defining anthem for the sapphic community just two years later, Leith has continued to build their name as one of the indie pop-folk genre’s most insightful songwriters, inviting listeners into every tumultuous journey and most intimate thought.
Their latest record, I Can See The Future sees Leith grapple with a new chapter of growing up, navigating grief, finding sense in community and asking the unanswerable questions about life. Unflinchingly sincere with a soundscape that feels like their deepest secrets come to life, Leith’s latest album is sure to be loved by fans of Phoebe Bridgers, Sydney Rose and Lizzy McAlpine.
Before its release, °1824 held a press conference with Leith to delve behind the scenes of the project, and here are our highlights from the conversation…
What made you decide on the album’s title, I Can See The Future?
“It’s a very slightly different version of the song, (I Can See) The Future - obviously without the brackets and I picked it for two reasons as it has two meaning for me. One is that half of the album is about me, my interpersonal relationships and understanding of myself, and the other half is about my understanding of the world and my place in it.
I Can See The Future represents believing in a better future and what that’s going to look like, with a meaning that’s more political in nature. On the other side, it’s about myself and my own life, because having a deeper understanding of myself allows me to look at both what has happened to me in the past and understand it better, but also to guess at and build on purpose my own future. The title song itself is probably my favourite on the record and most special to me emotionally, so it felt like the beating heart and good for the album’s title.”
Your album artwork has a collage-like quality, mod-podging images of yourself with elements of nature. What does that visual throughline represent for you and how intentional was that choice?
“On a surface level, I just love collaging! It’s one of my favourite little crafts to do but from a metaphorical and emotional perspective, I do feel like I constantly want to be able to represent all the themes that are at play on the record, so making collage really helps me to do that. When I look at the cover, each of those little things are pictures that I took on days of my life so I see all these memories that hold all these feelings that are related to the songs on the record or me and my personhood. When I get to see the record, it feels like an accurate representation of that time in my life. That’s the throughline, because it’s snapshots of things that mattered and made me write the record. My dream in making a collage like that - even though it won’t be as specific for people who are just looking at it - hopefully, they’ll get a similar feeling or impression.”
In January of 2023, your song Grieving was teased in a very short snippet during a jam session with Victoria Canal, Dodie, Jackson Lundy and Jordy Seacy. Was the concept of I Can See The Future already in motion at that time, and what is it about Grieving that fits into this upcoming project?
“Grieving did come first, and is definitely the oldest song on the record as I wrote it many years ago now around when I was grieving my grandfather. Until you asked, I hadn’t really thought about whether that song was a jumping off point for the themes of the record, but it probably is because in general, experiencing a large grief for the first time in my life was something that changed me artistically and as a person.
It made me start thinking more about the way that I’m living and loving people, and whether or not that needs to change or shift. In a sense, a lot of the concepts on the record were born out of me writing that song. When the rest of the record started coming together - and I felt like it was going to be a record - you’ll notice that the tracklist starts with Grieving then almost ends with Grieving - Reprise, with I Can See The Future being a bit of an outlier.
I felt like the lyrical content of that song leant itself well to thinking about the concepts on the record, so Grieving - and more generally writing it and thinking about that concept - what that did to me and my life is a huge part of this record coming together and the themes that it discusses.”
Is this album something you expect fans to listen to in order?
“Yes, definitely, I would love them to! I feel like I always design it that way and it’s okay if people don’t, but the placement of the songs is very specific because (I Can See) The Future is the only song on the record that isn’t written from my own perspective. I wrote it from the perspective of someone living hundreds of years from now, or however long it takes in the world that I feel like I’m fighting for now in my life. I thought it’d be meaningful metaphorically to have most of the songs bookended by grieving, then (I Can See) The Future as an outlier almost as proof that its separate, like an homage to the fact that that future will happen after I’m dead, because it’s bigger than and beyond me.”
What’s the overall emotion that you want fans to feel coming out of listening to the album?
“Hopeful! I hope that it’s an opportunity to feel a bunch of really hard things but in the end, be reassured that things will change and be better. Even if we don’t get to see it, the world and humanity will continue to evolve and develop and life will go on.”
When you picture listeners hearing I Can See The Future for the first time, what kind of setting or atmosphere do you imagine it being played in?
“You’re on a bike by yourself, there’s a cool breeze on your face and you’re looking back on your whole life, considering the entire world and everything that everything means. Or, you’re on a walk or driving either to a new place or an old place that you haven’t visited in a while. Anything that would lend itself to feeling the fullness of nostalgia and wonderment. I’m making up words but thinking about the past and the future to the fullest extent that you can. For me, that’s definitely exacerbated by a specific situation where I’m allowed to indulge myself in those feelings, so anything that feels romantic, nostalgic and reflective.”
If someone is listening to your music for the very first time with this release, which track would you want them to hear first and why?
“I feel like Stay would be a gentle intro and a good summary of the things that are talked about on the record. It’s a combination of those two very extreme emotions of almost sadness and desperation, but also celebration, happiness and joy.”
How did you approach crafting the sound to match the message of the song, Stay?
“I wrote the first half and then really liked it and wanted to come back to it. Usually I write songs in one full sitting so it was pretty unusual for me but I knew it needed something else. I tried to write a second verse and chorus in the style of the first half but it didn’t really work, so I sat down and wrote the rest of it all in one go. It happened pretty naturally as I was wanting to make sure that all of the emotions I was feeling were represented in the song. To do that, I almost always turn to a vibe shift in music. It doesn’t matter what kind, but I like when I want there to be a very obvious emotional contrast and then to provide a very obvious musical contrast. As far as style, I went with my instinct and figured out what would come next!”
What’s your favourite song on your album, and what song do you think will be the most popular with fans?
“My favourites are (I Can See) The Future or I Will and honestly, I have no idea. I’ll sometimes try to guess and am never right so am letting what will be, be. I’m excited to hear what resonates with people and what surprises them.”
Photo Credit: Adam Kelly
Between your 2023 album To Learn and I Can See The Future, how do you feel your songwriting and sound has evolved?
“Songwriting feels more like a kind of nebulus thing. I’m always songwriting and am a person who writes a lot, so it’s kind of like how you can’t see yourself growing up. I feel like I can’t see it from a third person perspective and don’t really understand how my songwriting has changed, but I know it probably has and I just can’t tell.
As far as sound, it feels like I’ve been a musician for a long time already but this is only my second full-length project. I think, generally what’s happened is that I’ve worked with different people and developed more language and skills when it comes to recording and production - and more confidence, which is a big one for me because I was always used to being the guy with an acoustic guitar writing a song and was less confident once I was in a room with someone on a computer, but I feel a bit more sure of myself in that world now.
This record is sonically in some ways quite similar to things I’ve done before, but in other moments quite different. I think most of it is getting to work with Rostam and being true creative collaborators and co-producers. Also, having access to more recording resources if that makes sense because there was real opportunity to try sounds on my songwriting that I’ve always wanted to hear so that was really special.”
What challenges came with writing and recording a sophomore album after the success of To Learn? Do you see this new project as a continuation of that story, or more like a rebirth?
“I guess a continuation. I feel like To Learn was definitely a coming-of-age record for me because I was writing all of those songs when I was experiencing some of the greatest changes that I’ve known in my life thus far. It was very intense for me and I feel like you can hear that on the record, but it was really written over the course of my becoming an adult - or at least of my pre-frontal cortex developing!
What I’ve realised from the songs that ended up on I Can See The Future is that I’ll never let go of my nostalgia. I’ll always be writing songs about getting older and my life changing, and I’m never going to not write a coming-of-age record. Whether that age be 27, 35 or 52, I’m always going to be writing about some coming-of-age.
This record definitely feels like an older sibling to the last because there’s so much more. To Learn is like: Who am I and what do I mean to my immediate life? But I Can See The Future is more so: Who Am I and what do I mean to everything? My scope of that consideration has expanded so much, and now I think much less about my life and my own interpersonal relationships and more about where I fit in the world and the grand scheme of things, and what that means for who I’ve been and will become. I hope that people hear the homages in this record to those same sentiments from a slightly more grown up perspective, and I’m pumped to see if it inspires a lot of those same feelings in people after hearing it, too.”
Do you have any recommendations for interesting books, films or albums that have changed the way you approach making music?
“I love the movie About Time, it’s one of my favourite movies ever and that movie saved me from depression when I was in college and probably rewrote my brain a little bit. Any media - Everything Everywhere All at Once kind of does this, too - but any media about how the average human life is equally important to every other human life because we’re all people, and that specific sentiment in media is I would say the main driving force of my creativity and what I always go back to in order to connect with my own humanity and feel sentimental, corny or like I want to create.”
If you were to imagine this album as a movie, what would the plot be?
“Maybe it’s from the perspective of the main character in (I Can See) The Future hundreds of years from now, and it’s kind of a time jump situation. Maybe they’ve uncovered something from their great-great-great grandparents and then it time jumps to their life, and back to the person hundreds of years in the future. Selfishly, I would love to see that and imagine that the future world could come true, but I also think it’d be a fun narrative!”
Photo Credit: Shayla Loewen
While writing your upcoming album, were there any tracks that spilled out of you - or ones that were really hard to write?
“I’m someone who has never sat down to write a song. I’ve never been like, hey I have a couple hours, I’m free to write. I exclusively write music when I’m experiencing a feeling so intensely that I have to, which sounds so corny but that’s definitely how I experience it. It’s very rare that I start a song and then don’t finish it. I feel like the only times where I struggle with the development of a song is within a recording setting, because the songwriting itself comes pretty easily, but sometimes we go back and forth to figure out what something should be like whilst we’re producing it.
The songs that were most visceral and emotional to write and took over me the most were probably Grieving, I see the Future, I Will and also Alone. As far as songs where I took a second to get in the studio, I Will was a big one because there were a lot of different versions of it and it was the toughest one to figure out how to translate into a recording setting but I’m super happy with what we settled on.”
What song from the project was the most fun to write or see come together in the studio?
“Maybe Alone? I wrote that from a feeling that I really really liked so I have a positive memory of writing that song. The song’s about this realisation that no person you’ve ever known or will know - even the ones closest to you - will ever know every version of you but yourself. When you’re a friend to yourself and have a deep understanding of that, it feels so good and deep and important, so I have a strong positive association with writing that song.
In the studio, we created this beautiful moment that I always dreamed of for it where the first three quarters of the song is quite intimate and acoustic, but then it explodes into this big, beautiful and overwhelming feeling which was very cathartic and meaningful to hear it come to life.”
Has writing the record shifted your own understanding of the questions you were carrying, or do they still haunt you in the same way?
“I feel like for me, writing music is very similar to trying to answer philosophical questions. Writing feels like the attempt to get to the bottom of a feeling, and it always makes me feel better to ask. It’s frustrating to have a question, but it feels better to ask even if you don’t get an answer which is the whole concept of philosophy. It’s like, you’re never going to have a real answer to what ‘the meaning of life’ is, but it feels better to ask because its participating in this deeply human experience and allowing that human emotion to drive you.
In some ways, by learning about myself and having a better understanding of who I want to be, it has definitely comforted me and answered some questions but, on the other hand, by asking a big question, sometimes I’ll have more questions than when I started and become potentially even more confused and lost - but I enjoy that feeling. I like asking questions I’ll never have answers to because it feels like such a human endeavour and I’ve been trained to do that since I was very young. My dad is retired now but he was a philosophy and ethics professor so from a very young age, around the dinner table there were questions about the meaning of everything that I knew I’d never have answers to, and it’s brought me great comfort in my life.”
You’ve mentioned that Stay is about learning to lean on others. What is something you’ve learned while making this new project that has helped you connect more with the people around you?
“Just in general, thinking about the concept of what I wrote about in Stay has encouraged me to be a more active community member and better friend. Right now, especially in the West, we take it for granted and don’t often go out to seek community and put a lot of effort into it because we’re taught that individuality is the order of the day. I’ve been trying to learn how to fight back on that and make being a good community member a really important part in my life and something that I try to participate in every day, even when it feels unnatural.
As it relates to making the record, I definitely learned how to have a bunch of different relationships that I hadn’t had before making this record, in particular my relationship with Rostam. We didn’t really know each other before we started working together, but now he’s a really good friend. He taught me a lot about advocating for myself both musically and personally, and about collaborating because in general, I’ve learned to take a more active role. I don’t want to continue sitting back and hoping things will happen. I want to be working towards them - really in any area of my life - and just trying harder to be there for people and a part of things.”
Photo Credit: Adam Kelly
In the song Stay, you sing “I cannot be human alone.” What’s an experience you had while making I Can See The Future that reflects this sentiment? Was there a particular person or group of people who felt like community as you crafted this album?
“There were a bunch of moments to be honest but I think that all the ones that led to me writing that specific line were kind of bad things, which seems counterintuitive but I was experiencing hardship or helping other people through hardship and had this intense remembering that I’m never the only person who is experiencing something. Being a human being is having shared experiences with other human beings, and so quite literally the concept of being human wouldn’t work without humanity, which involves everybody else.
So, it was a combination of things: some work I was doing with friends in the city, making dinner with people I love when they were having a really hard time. They weren’t the good moments, they were the hard moments and then realising that we wouldn’t have the structure to deal with those hard moments if we didn’t all have each other.”
A major theme within your music is the connection between humans; their relationships, their strengths and their weaknesses. Do you find it comes easier to you to write about these themes than maybe others do?
“Maybe, I don’t know! I think again, what I was saying about being around my dad, it’s become a habit of mine and honestly probably sometimes to my detriment. I’m a little bit obsessive with trying to understand any kind of relationship. I’ll have a falling out with someone or they’ll do me wrong and I’ll become obsessed with trying to understand why and see their full humanity, getting to the bottom of every question and knowing the big why’s about everything.
I feel like it does come more easily to me, but it’s because it’s the way that I’ve always been, even outside of making art it’s part of my everyday life to think about those things obsessively. So, it’s more born out of what I was taught by my parents and then a lifelong habit of considering those things.”
Your music has become especially important for LGBTQIA+ listeners who feel seen in your lyrics. How do you balance writing for yourself with an added cultural responsibility?
“What I’ve concentrated on is just trying to write songs as honestly as possible from my own perspective, and I think because I’m queer and queerness for me goes way beyond identity, who I am and have romantic relationships with; it’s a lens for the world, a politic and it’s everything. It’s a way of living that allows you to question everything and not just accept things for the way that they are. If I am truly being queer, then I’m going to be expressing sentiments that help people process the world in their own ways and I’m hopeful that that’s enough to bring them comfort.
Instead of saying, this is the specific way that I’m queer and this is my representation of queerness, it’s more like: here’s the way that I see and question the world based on my queerness, I hope that it allows you to see and question the world based on yours.”
How do you feel that your relationship to community is shaped by your relationship to queerness?
“Specifically relating to community, preferably in this revolutionary, anti-capitalist way where I’m trying as best I can to divorce my relationships from the structure of the world that we live in and see what they can look like outside of that. I want to feed people in more ways than one, and I want to share things in a way that doesn’t fit inside the narrative that we’re forced to live in. I want to break those rules, live differently and live together differently, which is a teaching that I learned from understanding that I was different from a young age and having to question myself because if you can question yourself, then you have a stepping stone for questioning everything else and finding a new way to do it.”
Do you prefer to make clear what your songs are about or to let listeners derive their own ways of resonating with your music?
“It’s something I used to think about and now purposefully try not to. I’ve had moments of songwriting insecurity where I’ll write a song and it’ll be very obvious what I’m talking about and think: I should be cooler, I should make it more obscure, I should make it more poetic or a little harder to understand - like some of the songwriters I know who write in prose and you have to really dissect it.
Sometimes I’ll do that when it feels write but I’ve generally tried to stop allowing myself to have those feelings. If I’m writing a song and it’s straightforward because that’s what my feeling calls for, then I just let it be straightforward. If I’m writing and it comes out a little bit obscure and hard to understand then I let it be that, too. Generally, I’ve tried to stop letting my ego interfere when I write music and stop thinking about how people will hear it, and try to surface the song instead.”
Did you feel any pressure internally or from fans to follow up the success of We’ll Never Have Sex? Has your view or idea of success changed after it and if so, what does musical fulfillment look like to you now compared to then? Would you change anything regarding how We’ll Never Have Sex was received if given the chance?
“It was definitely a very defining experience of my life and career! As far as pressure to follow it up, I’m sure there is from other people but I try to be a little bit of a brick wall for myself when it comes to that. I always try to divorce these capitalistic ideas of success from my art if possible, so I prefer to think of We’ll Never Have Sex as this beautiful moment of this deeply personal thing somehow resonating with and becoming important to so many people.
I think it’ll always be so beautiful that it had that effect, and I kind of see that song as very outside of myself now. I like to look at it as something soaring away on it’s own, I’m just waving goodbye as it leaves and watching it from afar. I’ve left it to the universe and am so happy with whatever way it’s experienced from now until forever, and it’s so meaningful to me that it’s meaningful to so many people.
My definitions of success have changed so much in certain moments - of insecurity and pressure - but when I have reflective moments, I always come back to the fact that when I was young and writing music, my only dream was to give someone else the experience that I had when I was young whilst listening to music. If I’m ever having a hard day, I just go into my Instagram DMs or YouTube comments and see that a song I’ve written has had any kind of effect on a person’s life, I just cry and feel so fulfilled and recentered with what’s important, the point of making art and participating in that very human act of creation.”
Photo Credit: Adam Kelly
Your upcoming US tour will bring these songs into live spaces. What kind of atmosphere or experience do you hope fans take away from seeing this new chapter performed on stage?
“I have many dreams, and it can sometimes feel intimidating or difficult to try to put them into the context of a regular show. I often have these far off reams of doing a really strange tour where we’re all sitting on the floor or something that can be more conducive to this atmosphere of togetherness. I do sometimes find it hard to curate that in specific sorts of rooms but we have tried some things in the past to make it feel like more of a communal experience.
I definitely want to continue experimenting with how to make that happen, because with this record specifically, that’s what I dream of fostering for the people who listen to it, for myself and for those who come to the shows. We’re going to try to bring in some local organisations that are doing great grassroots work if we can to kind of connect the audience members and give them something to do in their city or where they live that’ll further their relationships with each other in the community.
As far as the actual live shows, musically, I hope that it will feel therapeutic and like a moment of togetherness in a world that is definitely making us feel like we don’t have that anymore.”
What song from the new album are you most looking forward to experiencing with fans on tour? Is there a lyric you’re most excited to sing together?
“I think Alone because of the big moment at the end. It’s one phrase that repeats itself over and over again and gets really loud, so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to scream together a little bit and feel good about it. Also, Point of View because it’s a feel-good love song and I don’t have many of those in my discography so I’m pretty psyched to see people feeling good and being in love with each other in all ways so singing that together will be pretty touching! Grieving is always a pretty special experience live though it’s sometimes devastating, but it feels good to be sharing that with people - so that’s three in one, but the songs I’m most excited about.”
With a total of 21 shows across the US, Leith Ross’ tour will begin on October 17th with its opening night at The Park Theatre in Winnipeg. To purchase tickets for a city near you, make sure to head to Leith’s website.
As always, follow Leith Ross on Instagram for the latest updates on their work, and enjoy the rest of their stunning discography on Spotify. For those who need song recommendations, check out We’ll Never Have Sex, Orlando and (I Can See) The Future.
