premiere: Slow Talker - Mannequin

Leah Korbin wrote to me a couple weeks ago with her luminous, lovely first single with some thoughts on what powered the process of building forgiveness through her sounds. 

Howdy Mark,

My name is Leah. My boyfriend Josh Stuebe and I work at a recording studio in Van Nuys, CA called Fonogenic Studios, which is in a side-building of a nail polish factory called Orly and across the street from Budweiser. Our boss uses the studio as more of a playground for his experiments (he’s a magician as well as producer), which means we’ve gotten a fair amount of downtime the past few years.

For the album I picked songs I had written between 2012 - when I left college in Nashville - to 2015, which was my second year living in Los Angeles. Each song represents a very personal experience for me.

“Mannequin” was written during one of the most painful years of my life. My mom was diagnosed with cancer and the following month we discovered that my dad was cheating on her. I wrote it to cope with the possibility of my family falling apart by trying to empathize with the woman my father was cheating with. Los Angeles is across the country from where my parents live, so there was little I could do to help the situation. I felt powerless to comfort my mother and confused about what was actually happening because both sides had their own narratives of what the truth was. I harbored a lot of resentment towards the “other woman,” as she uprooted our lives and seemed more like a home-wrecking emotional blockade rather than a real person. Writing this song helped me to humanize someone whose story I didn’t know and begin to forgive her through my own narrative.

For context, I wasn’t a kid who grew up in a terrible household and turned to music because I had nowhere else to go. I had a wonderful childhood. My folks have always been supportive regarding my music ever since I picked up the violin at the age of five. It was their creative support that gave me an outlet when I needed to escape.

I’m an only child so I got all of my parent’s attention, which was a lot of pressure for someone who hated to be the center of attention. When my parents’ marriage began to strain I started to feel the burden of acting as a mediator between them. I turned to songwriting as a way to make sense of my world. Songwriting helped me understand how to be more patient, perceptive and forgiving of my parent’s issues - among other things - and gave me the strength to be there for them when they needed me. Although songwriting is a great tool, nothing could prepare me for the loss of my dad to another woman, the end of my parents’ marriage, and the possible death of my mother to cancer. Not to mention there was obviously a lot of stress building up to this point. It took awhile to get out of my funk and start writing again, but, once I did, I began to heal.

Thank you!

Leah

Read more Letters to YVYNYL.