Leslie Mendelson

A funk band, then a troubadour

Mendelson arrived on the New York music scene in the early 2000s, first as a member of a funk group called Mother Freedom before peeling off into solo work with a jazz inflection. The move from band singer to songwriter was gradual rather than announced, and the first evidence of it was a self-released record, Take It As You Will, which appeared in 2005 with no label behind it.

The musical household is part of the story and she tells it on stage. A reviewer who watched her in Massachusetts in August 2025 noted she describes herself as coming from "a long line of schtick" — a father who played, a grandfather who performed with a USO outfit, a family band in the lineage. It explains a particular quality in her shows: the between-song patter is not filler bolted onto the set, it is part of the trade she inherited.

Three records and one songwriting partnership

The proper debut was Swan Feathers in 2009, written with Steve McEwan and co-produced by Joel Dorn. It earned a Grammy nomination in the engineering category and a round of comparisons to the Carole King and Carly Simon lineage that she has been politely shaking off ever since. Then came a long gap.

Love & Murder followed in 2017 on Royal Potato Family, and If You Can't Say Anything Nice… in spring 2020, made with McEwan and the bassist and engineer Lorenzo Wolff in roughly two weeks for very little money. Mendelson has been direct about where that album came from: "The anger and depression got to me, and I couldn't hold it in anymore. So, I went into the studio with my demons and we hit record." The stated model was the stripped-back John Lennon of Plastic Ono Band, and the arrangements were left deliberately sparse. Her account of her own method is similarly unvarnished — "I tend to write a lot about whatever I'm facing, whether it's anxiety or depression or insecurities."

McEwan has been the constant across all of it, a three-time Grammy winner who writes with her rather than for her. Mendelson's description of how the two of them work is characteristically undramatic: "We give each other the space to mess around until something develops."

The door Jackson Browne opened

The turn came from a house party. In 2017 the director Paul Haggis met Mendelson in Brooklyn and asked her to write for 5B, the documentary he made with Dan Krauss about the AIDS ward at San Francisco General Hospital. The song that resulted, "A Human Touch", was co-written and sung with Jackson Browne, and it changed the size of the rooms she played.

After the film's release she sang the duet with Browne at the Beacon Theatre in New York in June 2019 and joined his West Coast dates that August. The same year she opened for The Who at Madison Square Garden twice, in May and again in September — an experience she has called "the scariest thing I've ever done", and one she survived the second time partly by putting a Wurlitzer on stage to make the arena feel smaller.

Browne's assessment of her, offered around that period, is the most quoted thing anyone has said about her writing: "Leslie is a master of writing from her subconscious. It's not from the mind; it's from somewhere the mind can't comprehend." He has also said, more plainly, that her melodies reach back into his own youth. Alongside Browne she has worked with Bob Weir, Steve Kimock and Dave Schools, which is how a songwriter from the folk-pop end of things ended up with a following in the jam-band press.

After The Party

The fourth album, After The Party, came out on 21 June 2024 through Pasadena Records and Royal Potato Family: ten tracks, just under forty-one minutes, cut at Grove Masters, Browne's studio in Santa Monica. Peter Asher produced with McEwan, and Tyler Chester supervised three tracks. The session list reads like the credits on the records Mendelson grew up near — Waddy Wachtel on guitars, Leland Sklar on bass, Jim Keltner on drums.

Asher's verdict on his own artist was that she "can combine elegant precision with the soul and emotional resonance of a deeply moving writer and performer". The reviews broadly agreed while declining to file it as nostalgia. Writing in Glide on 20 June 2024, Doug Collette said the record "transcends genre in painting a portrait of a sly and slightly prickly individual not averse to speaking her mind outright but capable of a readily discernible level of nuanced expression as well". John Apice, reviewing for Americana Highways three days earlier, went to the voice — "satiny easy listening voice with folky-pop properties" — and reached for Julie London and Sarah McLachlan rather than the Laurel Canyon shorthand the press release invited.

"Other Girls" was the preview single. "Have a Little Heart", "Rock and Roll on the Radio", "The Good Life" and the title track are the ones that have stuck in the live set. She launched it with a hometown show at City Winery in New York on 26 June 2024, having already taken support slots with Rhett Miller, The Wallflowers and Roger Daltrey before the headline run began.

Autumn 2026

Two years on, After The Party is still the record she is touring, and the Daltrey connection has become the biggest platform she has. On 17 June 2026 Daltrey announced A Great Night Out!, a 22-date American run between 23 August and 3 October 2026, with Dan Bern, Jeffrey Gaines, Amy Helm and Mendelson splitting the opening slots. Her two were the largest-profile dates of her year: the Ryman Auditorium in Nashville on 9 September and The Town Hall in New York on 27 September.

The Ryman set was forty minutes, 7.30pm to 8.10pm, and ran The Good Life, Lay It All on Me, When It Comes To Love, Rock and Roll on the Radio and All Come Together. The Town Hall slot was shorter still, half an hour before Daltrey's nine-piece band took over. Earlier in the year she had been doing the opposite kind of night — full-length headline sets of thirteen or more songs at Trinity House Theatre in Livonia, Michigan on 13 March and the Wild Honey Backyard Amphitheatre in Los Angeles on 19 April, the latter taking in Have a Little Heart, Other Girls, the title track and Jericho.

October has her back on her own. After a private date in Roswell, Georgia on 9 October she plays the Nickel & Oak Lounge in Savannah on 14 October, Fogartyville in Bradenton, Florida on 16 October at 8pm with tickets at 25 to 30 dollars, and the Bearsville Theater in Woodstock, New York on 23 October. Across her documented shows, All Come Together and Jericho are the two songs she has played most often.

The craft of the small room

Mendelson's live work has settled into a format that has little to do with the full-band sound of the records. The clearest account of it comes from the Midland Theatre in Newark, Ohio on 6 March 2025, where she played the venue's Stage Door Cabaret — 120 people at thirty tables placed on the stage itself. She performed the whole thing alone and acoustic, perched on a stool with a guitar and a harmonica, and at one point produced guitar effects with her own voice before asking the room why she sounded like a cat.

Five months later, on 8 August 2025 at the deCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln, Massachusetts, the setting was a lawn of picnic blankets and a basic speaker rig, and the reviewer's main complaint was the absence of proper staging rather than anything she did on it. Her oldest material still appears — "I Know You Better Than That" from Swan Feathers turned up in that set — alongside "A Human Touch" and a kazoo-led country number.

That reviewer's summary, that she is "a charming, comfortable, natural performer", is the recurring note. The Ohio audience sang harmony on the covers, clapped through the originals, stood up for the closer, and she met them at the stage door afterwards to say so.