“Flavored with the kind of sweetened melancholy that will warm your broken heart and fill it with hope”

– Holler Country (full feature here)

“Gina Leslie sounds like what it feels like to have your head against the window of a Greyhound bus pulling away from a city where you and your sweetheart just broke up. And it’s raining.” – Guy at the bar

With a spellbinding voice and tender insightful songwriting, New Oleans-based Gina Leslie has established herself as a budding artist to watch with her February 11 release, No You’re Crying. Born into a musical family in Colorado, she spent the better part of her formative years barefoot at a bluegrass festivals, fiddle camps, and crowded family jams. After years of honing her voice as an artist and songwriter, Leslie now gives us No, You’re Crying, her debut solo release, recorded over the past two years of isolation. The songs came to life in the hot attic of a bright yellow house in New Orleans, and they capture a time and place of heartbreak and solitude. It’s everything a good breakup album should have– rootlessness and longing, an acceptance of life’s sadness, with a yearning to find happiness– but like anything worth its weight, more than the sum of its sorrows. 

Floating between country and jazz, blending a melancholic jubilee that sinks its teeth into your heart, No, You're Crying asks you to think about heartbreak as more than a lament for what you've lost, or a memory of what you miss. As Gina puts it on “I See You Everywhere I Go,” true heartbreak is love and loss together, the pain of knowing you have to let go before you do, “holding on to what's already gone.” The first single, “Little Company” is the EP’s high point of hopefulness, a song written on a lonely birthday when the company of even a mosquito is welcome. The EP rounds out with the epic ballad “How Many Waltzes is Too Many Waltzes”, an ode to Louisiana and love lost along the way. The songs weave together sounds of pedal steel, fiddles, organ, clarinet and luscious harmonies to envelop the ears in waves of feelings, and entice the listener to dim the lights and pour a glass of smooth liquor.

With most of her life devoted to playing everything from bluegrass to folk to jazz, she’s absorbed a huge swath of American music and made it her own.  Leslie is also well known as a side musician, recording and performing with countless artists in New Orleans and beyond - The Sam Doores Band, Esther Rose, Ric Robertson, and her family band, The Bad Bad Leslies. Above all, what strikes you about Leslie’s original music is the way it makes you feel—a delicate world between happy and sad. Indeed, this project arrives just in time to be the broken-hearted Valentine’s Day release.