Erynn McLeod performs as part of a trio with Sydney Boggs and Chris Matthews at SuperFly Brewing on November 2. More info at erynnmcleod.com. Photo: Aaron Farrington.
Turn on Erynn McLeod’s debut EP, Man of the House, and the first thing you’re likely to hear is a clear musical theater influence—the cabaret crooning, the overt metaphor, the complex characters, the ebb and flow of emotion. That’s all by design, the Charlottesville resident and Front Porch music teacher says. Growing up in New York City as the daughter of a successful Broadway actor (Raymond Jaramillo McLeod) and acting teacher (Deborah Kym), McLeod is indelibly imprinted with the language of the theater. But a darker side of McLeod’s childhood emerges as you work through the classically trained musician’s first professional recordings.
“It’s a record about the tumultuousness of a dysfunctional family and what it means to be the man of the house,” McLeod says. “As a young girl, what does it mean to fill shoes that are too big for you … to step into this parental role?” McLeod doesn’t offer details on her family’s dysfunction, but she has much to say about it throughout Man of the House—perhaps nowhere more than on the EP’s title track. There, McLeod has a dramatized conversation with her mother, who tells her that in the face of an unnamed adversary, she has to be “man of the house, kid of the year.” On the EP’s third track, “House on Fire,” McLeod plumbs the same parental relationships, admitting she’s her father’s daughter before ruminating on the “flames” of her upbringing, something she’s been looking to escape for years. “I am my mother’s child / I have her mother’s smile,” McLeod sings. “She says, ‘I’m not gonna leave him’ / I’m the sea that stands between them.”
Charlottesville has turned into something of a refuge for McLeod. Seeking space from her family and New York, she moved to the Blue Ridge after earning a bachelor’s degree in music from Stony Brook University and briefly studying at the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in 2017.
It was a love interest that brought McLeod to Virginia, but it was the music scene that drew her in. She shared a room with Erin Lunsford of Erin and the Wildfire and became close with pop-folk singer Genna Matthew. McLeod and Matthew enrolled in the same program at Berklee College of Music’s Valencia, Spain, campus in 2018.
The two songwriters roomed together in Valencia, and both received master’s degrees in contemporary music performance in 2019. It was a productive time for McLeod; she wrote a volume of music while at the conservatory—winning an award at the International Writers Camp in the Netherlands along the way—and returned stateside not only with a degree, but also with enough material to go into the studio.
Finding the right building blocks for Man of the House proved a challenge. Emerging from her master’s program into the COVID-19 years, McLeod returned to Charlottesville—“It felt right and good,” she says—but struggled to pin down the right producer. She eventually forged an unlikely alliance with Garret Rhodes and Tyler Chiartas of New Immunity. The two producers were working mostly on electronic dance music at the time.
“I was feeling discouraged,” McLeod says. “Garret and Tyler had seen me play at Starr Hill, I think, and the first song we did was ‘House on Fire.’ They really understood the storytelling of it immediately. They made me feel safe.”
The resulting record features Chiartas on electric guitar and fellow Front Porch instructor Lucas Rhondeau on piano alongside McLeod’s vocals and acoustic guitar. Synthesized instrumentation fills out the balance of the EP’s adept arrangement.
On “Opal,” the album’s second track, McLeod explores a character who “reminds her of her mother.” Opal is a study in contradictions, a person who smiles in the face of adversity and wants to do the right thing but falls back on denial and intellectual dishonesty to battle through her hard times. The same contradictions emerge on the album’s final song, “Quiet,” a more autobiographical look at struggle and triumph.
“I feel, sometimes, a lot of pressure to live up to my parents, who were at the top of their game,” McLeod says. “But I also kind of want to separate myself.”
McLeod cites sonic influences from James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, and Carole King—all of which come out on Man of the House. She says her time in Charlottesville has increasingly introduced her to folk and bluegrass music; she’s recently been drawn to Americana artists like Gillian Welch.
McLeod introduced her debut at a release party at The Southern Café & Music Hall on August 17, and has since begun recording more music with Rhodes and Chiartas while working toward an eventual debut LP.
In the meantime, McLeod is playing around C’ville with local musicians and Front Porch alums Sydney Boggs and Chris Matthews. The trio will open for Seattle-based indie rockers Coral Grief at SuperFly Brewing on November 2—an opportunity for McLeod to show more folks that the musical theater-influenced sound is having a moment.
“I think musicals like Rent and Hamilton kind of changed the face of musical theater,” McLeod says. “There are no boundaries anymore. People love a story. People want to be told a story and brought somewhere else.”
