Grammy-nominated songwriter making solo debut at Tucson Folk Festival

Leslie Mendelson wasn’t sure how she landed as one of the headliners of the 39th annual Tucson Folk Festival this weekend.

But she’ll take it.

“I couldn’t believe when I saw I was headlining. I’m so honored; that’s so cool,” she said during a phone call late last month.

The Brooklyn, New York, Americana singer-songwriter is headlining alongside former Tucsonan Lisa Morales, Native American blues rocker Keith Secola, the newgrass trio Cross-Eyed Possum, Tucson’s own Carnivaleros and several others.

The festival runs Friday, April 5, through Sunday, April 7, with more than 400 musicians doing 150 performances on six stages downtown, centered around Jácome Plaza, 101 N. Stone Ave.; Mendelson in set to take the Plaza Stage at 5 p.m. Sunday.

Mendelson’s music leans more folk-rock than folk acoustic, although her Folk Festival show with her longtime songwriting partner Steve McEwan will feature just the duo on guitars.

“I feel like my stuff is folk-rock, with a hint of country,” she explained, summing it up as simply Americana because “I draw from so many influences” including Joni Mitchell, the Beatles and Randy Newman.

Rocker Jackson Browne said the songwriter reminded him of Burt Bacharach and Carole King.

Browne made the comments after he and Mendelson teamed up in 2018 to record her song “A Human Touch” for the “5B” documentary soundtrack.

Mendelson wrote the song with McEwan for the documentary about the world’s first AIDS ward established at San Francisco General Hospital in the 1980s.

“Steve is a brilliant writer and Jackson loved it,” she recalled. “We got together in New York and we recorded it and it made the movie.”

It also sparked a friendship that brought Mendelson to Tucson for the very first time in 2021, when she was touring with Jackson. She opened for Browne when he played the first post-pandemic live show at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall that September, just as live music was starting to come back.

Being Browne’s friend has perks aside from touring; last year, Mendelson used Browne’s studio to record her forthcoming album, “After the Party,” due out June 21.

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It is a departure from her 2020 album “If You Can’t Say Anything Nice ...”

“That album was dark,” she said, describing it as her primal scream at the world.

“Even before the pandemic, the 24-hour news cycle and people dealing with anxiety and depression,” she said. “It was my way of talking about those feelings. It was very much of that time and of me wanting to scream and let it all out.”

“After the Party” is her exhale as the world emerged from the other side of the pandemic’s darkness, isolation and uncertainty.

“I started to feel like I was coming out of this fog and that’s what this album feels like, the lifting of the clouds, so to speak,” said the Grammy-nominated Mendelson.

She released the album’s first single, “Other Girls,” on major streaming platforms in mid-March and has a second single queued up in the coming weeks.

“Other Girls,” with its infectious melody and driving guitar and percussion, is a full-on pop-rock song — “Yeah I went for it,” she says — that draws on women empowering women with a subtle wink-wink to indulging fantasies.

“It felt right,” she said of her pop approach. “I could have done it a million ways but when we got into the studio we started playing and it played exactly how it came out; it needed to be a rock song. It had a bit of an edge. The subject matter is edgy. I had something to say and it needed to be said.”

“Other Girls” will be on her setlist Sunday along with several other cuts from “After the Party,” including “Rock and Roll on the Radio,” “The Good Life” and “Keep a Little Light On.” She’ll also draw from her five other studio albums with a few covers thrown in, including a deconstructed acoustic version of the Pretenders’ “Don’t Get Me Wrong,” before closing her show the with the final cut on “After the Party,” the deprecating “I Know A Lot of People,” taken from Heath Ledger’s famous quote, “I don’t have many friends, I just know a lot of people.”

“We took it and we kind of flipped it on its head,” Mendelson said.

During live performances of the song, she asks if anyone in the audience can whistle, and suddenly “I get like hundreds of people whistling and its the most fun ever,” she said. “It’s a blast.”

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