Odie Leigh gets the chorus rolling at The Sinclair on Sunday, 10 November 2024.

Charlotte Rose Benjamin plays games in the opening slot.

Additional photos by Daniel Nova, Jr.

Charlotte Rose Benjamin performed as a four-piece, squeezing out gentle winsome indie pop. Close enough to alt country that you’d only need a little steel pedal to push it over the top. A slow to medium tempo, with a bit of the Cowboys Junkies vibe on a good day. In addition to the standard stage banter, Benjamin played a guessing game with the audience. Namely, “guess the Gwenyth Paltrow movie she’s thinking of right now,” which, as games go, seems like more a game of chance than a game of skill, which makes it illegal in many jurisdictions.

Deferring to the writeup at my Cambridge Day gig, which may or may not be posted yet. Hawt show! Thanks to Daniel Nova, Jr. for supplying extra photos — see his gallery.

Rootsy pop rocker Odie Leigh rolled through the Sinclair last week for a night of music that spun the dial between cozy campfire singalongs and arena-ready bombast with ease.

The musician, originally out of Baton Rouge, now calling Detroit home, crafts a well-traveled sound. You can hear strains of blues, soul, rock, and folk work their way through the speakers on her latest LP Carrier Pigeon, whose tracks featured prominently on the setlist.

But what the young, adoring, and largely female fans in the crowd heard most of all were their own hopes, dreams, and anxieties set to song, and fed back to them by a pop avatar they recognized as authentic.

Leigh first stumbled into the spotlight in 2020 on the wings of a viral TikTok post. She’s representative of a generation of musicians who got their first “big break” on social media. Which sounds crazy to grown ass adults, but it’s hard to imagine breaking into the music industry any other way at the moment. You think Gwen Stefani and Snoop Dog are going to vote you into a record contract on The Voice?

Social media is a hellscape, but it’s our hellscape. And it can provide a conduit, connecting artist and fan, that communicates stirrings of the soul with a surprising clarity. If you have the right eyes and ears. And the fans at The Sinclair had just the right eyes and ears for the job, singing from memory the chorus of “Either Way” from Odie Leigh.

“Do you want to know me /

like I want to know you?

Do you want to kiss me /

like I want to kiss you?”

The fans in attendance weren’t moved to learn those lyrics through the radio, a local concert, or even a streaming platform. Most of them probably discovered Odie Leigh the Online Personality first, recognized a kindred spirit, and found their way to her music after. That’s the real nut of pop music, though, isn’t it? An unholy marriage of art and persona, fed through the mass media meat grinder, fraught with parasocial hobgoblins and commodified pathologies.

Hey, whatever fills a room. It doesn’t matter how you got here, we’re just glad that you made it.

Photo Gallery 1

Photos by Daniel Nova, Jr.

Photo Gallery 2

Photos by HDN Staff.