Leigh Ann Yost

Louisville-based sonaBLAST! Records is releasing singer-songwriter Leigh Ann Yost’s new “As I Live and Breathe’ on December 6.

“As I Live and Breathe” is different than the folky-pop of Yost’s first album “Basic Needs,” according to a sonaBlast news release.

Her second album shows the Louisville-based artist “maturing not only lyrically, but vocally as well,” according to the release.

Yost recorded “As I Live and Breather” at In Room One, located in an old building in the West End’s Portland neighborhood.

Backing her are Danny Kiely (who also produced the record), Paul Culligan, Peter Searcy, Mark “Lupe” Hamilton, Todd Hilldreth, Pete Petersen, danny flanigan and other Louisville musicians.

The release of “As I Live and Breathe” will include:

•live performances on WHAS’s Great Day Live morning show December 1.
•Yost performing at the Live Lunch concert series on WFPK 91.1 FM on December 2.
•an in-store performance at indie record store earx-tacy on December 6.
•the official CD release party at a Uncle Slayton’s on December 9.
Here’s the rest of the release:

Dividing life between full-time careers as mother, activist and musician, Leigh Ann Yost has multi-tasking down to an art. Literally. Her highly anticipated sophomore album, “As I Live and Breathe” will officially be released by sonaBLAST! Records on December 6, 2011. “Basic Needs,” her first self-released work, was mentioned in Louisville Magazine as one of the Top Five regionally recorded and produced records of 2006 by Laura Shine, Music Director at WFPK Radio Louisville, who quipped “… ‘Basic Needs’ by Leigh Ann Yost was an immediate add to our playlist–it blew me away! Excellent production, superb songwriting and musicianship and deliriously good vocals. This album is a must have!”

Yost’s homegrown stories of love, loss and winding roads–some paved, some not–are captured in rhythm and song and projected on one’s soul. That is the difference between hearing music and witnessing an artist. Whether it’s part of an explosive nightclub set past midnight, a fundraiser at a sun-dappled park or a road trip with a soundtrack to go –her music has become a part of the emotional and social landscape of Louisville, Kentucky.

Laura Shine recently says, “On Basic Needs, which was a while ago, {there] were two originals, which were outstanding: ‘Breathe’ and ‘Down,’ both deserving of national airplay, I thought. Both songs got plenty of calls from listeners, and still do, so she has a way of resonating and connecting with her songwriting and music obviously. Not everybody does. That’s a real gift.”

Fellow musician and recording artist danny flanigan says, “I spent a lot of time with her first CD – as a listener. Several of the songs really captivated me and wouldn’t let go for weeks at a time. The reason is that the melodies were simple and magnetic. Sonically – her voice sits in a part of the musical spectrum that is warm and soothing – you just want to keep listening. She sings with conviction – the songs are real – she’s not making up namby-pamby rhymes. For me – that’s the best part of it–real art – for a real world that needs it.”

For more information, contact Amber Garvey, ? amber@sonablast.com.

SonaBlast! is headquartered in The Green Building 732 E. Market St. in NuLu.

- InsiderLouisville,com

September 2, 2010, Leigh Ann Yost signs with sonaBLAST! Records, Louisville, KY and New York, NY.

Leigh Ann's introduction to sonaBLAST! comes via an addition to a 2009 compilation of lullabies, "Louisville Lullabies."

An entrepreneur and a music lover, Gill Holland, founder of sonaBLAST! recalls seeing her name and her image on Louisville Music News cover before seeing her perform.

" Then I kept seeing her name playing all the time, which is always impressive," he said, "So finally, I needed to meet her. I asked her to be on lullaby compilation and first heard her sing at a fundraiser and was smitten!"


- sonaBLAST!

"... 'Basic Needs' by Leigh Ann Yost was an immediate add to our playlist--it blew me away! Excellent production, superb songwriting and musicianship and deliriously good vocals. This album is a must have!"
- Laura Shine - Best of Louisville DeeJay, Music Director, WFPK - WFPK Radio Louisville

ON BEING LEIGH ANN YOST:By Tim Roberts • Photos by Laura RobertsOn the Acrobatic Life as a Mother of Two, Wife of a Louisville Musician, Former Mortgage Broker and Karaoke Champ Who Has Just Released a Debut CD, How it All Works, Why the Fascination with George Michael's Second Solo Album and the Real Reason the Rolling Stones Came to Louisville

By Tim Roberts
Praying for Time

Anytime George Michael gets bad press, Leigh Ann Yost gets a bunch of hits on her web site.

The Internet has cyber-flipped the "no such thing as bad press" cliché. In our hyperlinked cosmos, bad press for someone might mean good press or at least a flash of exposure for someone else. Name drop like crazy on your web site, pack your body text with keywords and the search engines will stretch out their spidery virtual legs, snatch your site and pull your cyberpresence into a long list of others that may have some vague relation to what someone was originally looking for.

To be sure, though, you won't see Yost's site listed first on Google if you do a search on George Michael. It appears several pages later, sometime after an article on "George Michael's Fat Slug Obsession" (written after he was caught by a photographer, staggering from a batch of shrubs where he had been riding the skin bus with an unemployed van driver with stubble and a beer gut) and a few pages after several links to fan sites for Michael Cera, the young actor who played the character George Michael Bluth on the TV series Arrested Development.

"I love George Michael," she gushes quietly, "absolutely. I didn't like the Wham! Stuff too much. It was more when he came out on his own. He had an album out, Listen Without Prejudice, the one with the song 'Freedom.' The whole album is phenomenal. I loved it from the first time I played it."

So what does George Michael have to do with a mother of two boys in her mid-thirties, a wife of a veteran Louisville musician, a mortgage broker who has just released a debut solo album after working as a vocalist with Hank Sinatra, one of the city's barroom favorites and the defunct Gigolo Gypsy? Other than the fact that their names are connected by a fine thread in cyberspace?


Photo By Laura RobertsDarnell LevlineNot much, other than she's a fan and that Michael's song "Waiting for That Day" from Listen Without Prejudice is the next-to-last track on her debut recording Basic Needs.

And it is fitting that Leigh Ann Yost would cover a song from that George Michael album, considering that it was released at the start of a new decade, when we had just emerged puzzled and weary from one of Conspicuous Consumption, with Yuppies and their 'Baby on Board' signs in the windows of their BMWs, when songs more than twenty years old were resurrected from their peaceful slumber to sell shock absorbers and ketchup was considered a vegetable. Michael had crafted a smart, sexy, focused pop album, Faith, toward the end of the decade and seemed just as puzzled as the rest of us with his follow up: should it be pop, should it sound like wailing Gospel, should it have a touch of swing that conjures up grainy monochromed images of a Manhattan skyline at night, should it question the shallow benefits of celebrity or bear hug it.

He was pulling himself in thirty directions at once and somehow making it all work.

A lot like Leigh Ann Yost.

"I'm really so strapped for time," she said. "Any time I have a show, it takes me two hours to get the e-mails all together to send them out, then I have to get the posters up. It takes a lot of time to promote yourself and every night, when the kids go to bed and I'm not playing, from nine to 11 or 12, I'm trying to meet people [in the music business]."

We were seated at a table at the Heine Bros. coffee shop at Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway, a major node along the Baxter-Bardstown-Bonnycastle Subculture Conduit, where bars share street blocks with boutiques, where you'll find chain restaurants and local eateries, health food and fast food, places for live music and recorded music, all prowled around-the-clock by skateboarders, students, latter-day Bohemians, the upscale and the curious who come from other parts of the city to wander the streets and make wishes about living there.

The Parkway's intersection is one of the conduit's entrance points, where continuing east takes you into Cherokee Park bordered by large, expensive older homes and west takes you to the university area and a node into the city's South End. Consider it a crossroads, but not like the one in the legend of blues singer Robert Johnson who was said to have sold his soul to the Devil so he could play guitar. More like the one Leigh Ann Yost is facing: continue full-time with a music career while handling the full-time responsibilities of being a mom, or continue to split her life in three ways by continuing with her job as a mortgage broker and handling those other two life tasks.

"No one's goa - Louisville Music News

Laura Shine, Music Director of 91.9 WFPK Radio Louisville, was asked to name her top 5 regionally produced and recorded LPs of 2006. "Basic Needs" by Leigh Ann Yost was #3, surrounded by Your Black Star, Louisville is for Lovers, Johnny Berry and Tyrone Cotton.

We asked WFPK-FM on-air host Laura Shine, who’s also the point person for locally submitted music the station receives, to name her top five area-produced CD choices for 2006. Here’s what she had to say:

"We get so much great music that is locally produced; my biggest challenge is weeding through it all, deciding what should go on-air and what should not. These decisions are based on production quality (will it sound good next to major-label studio releases?), songwriting, musicianship quality (which needs to be way above average) and whether or not it fits our alternative format, which includes most genres of music except hardcore rap, heavy metal and classical. My top five picks answer all of these questions with a resounding ‘YES!’"

3. Basic Needs, by Leigh Ann Yost. Genre: Mostly original folk-rock.

"You’d never know Leigh Ann sells mortgages for a living and does music on the side. It should be the other way around! Her voice is clear and strong and her songwriting is as good as it gets, with great storytelling and vivid imagery."


- Louisville Magazine