1-2-3-4… it’s a good time for strong independent women in music, Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo, Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa… before we even get to queen mega-streamed Taylor Swift. So, why not Leonie Jakobi? On her recent single ‘I Deserve To Shine’ she flaunts the kind of attacking raunch matched to melodic country radio-friendly sing-ability with ‘we all deserve the sunshine, and we all deserve a good time… don’t you turn it off.’
Her debut album – What Are The People Gonna Say (2025), is ‘the biggest news of my career… so far!’ she radiates joy. Flaming auburn hair rippling around her shoulders.
Advance single ‘So Much Love To Give’, was produced by ‘my friend Arielle,’ and is ‘all about wanting to love and wanting to give all the love you have, but always feeling like you have to hold back, and like, it’s too much, it’s all kind of based on the idea of the quote that grief is love with nowhere to go.’ ‘Don’t Mind Me (While I Give You Up)’ moves into denser darker more ironic moods, although the video seems to have been great fun. ‘Bedroom Eyes’ – with a video of her clubbing in Liverpool works around a solid dance-riff, while power-ballad ‘Look Down On Me’ aches with melancholy. She wrote ‘You’re So Special’ (2021) with producer Alec Brits. Then there’s Bonnie Raitt grit, offset by acoustic sensitivity, and the flat-out Rock of ‘You Had Me At Goodbye’ (2022), where she flips the rock-on horns sign at the video’s close.
It’s time to catch her as her star rises…
Andrew Darlington: It’s wonderful to get this opportunity of speaking to you.
Leonie Jakobi: Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate it. So cool.
AD: Are you Zoom!-speaking from Liverpool now?
LJ: No. I’m actually in Majorca this week, working at a Business Conference. So, I’m in a conference room right now because I just took a minute away. I’m always travelling. Always on the road.
AD: But – being based in Liverpool, have you done all the Beatles tours?
LJ: Done them all, yes, absolutely. I think I’ve done the Magical Mystery Bus Tour thing five times now, because every time I have people visit they say ‘we have to do the bus tour, it’s so cool.’ So – yes, done all the tours, done all the museums. Yes – always good fun. You’ll always learn something new. Have you done it?
AD: I just did the Magical Mystery bus tour once. So, you’re ahead of me on that. But Liverpool is still a happening city.
LJ: Yeah, it’s a great place, a great place to be.
AD: You were born in Frankfurt, but came the UK. In post-Brexit times some people were busy leaving England to live in Europe!
LJ: I know – yes, well, I was kind-of lucky because I came over here in 2018, and I was at Uni – I went to Uni in Liverpool, so Brexit happened while I was at Uni, so they kind-of had to give me a visa. So that worked out well for me, actually. I always say… people who ask, like, ‘isn’t it really hard for you now?’ and I’m like ‘I don’t know, I think for me it’s a great situation to be in because I can work in the UK, I can work in Europe, so I’m lucky. So yes, if I’d come a couple of years later that would have been a different story. But I was quite lucky, yes.
AD: You don’t have much trace of a German accent.
LJ: It really depends on where I go. Sometimes people say I sound a little bit American, other people say I sound Irish, and then people say I sound German – I don’t know. I always just say I learned English from Scousers, so – that’s that!
AD: You’ve been recording the album in Nashville. That must be wonderful?
LJ: Yes. I recorded most of the album in Nashville in January with the artist Arielle (Analog Girl In A Digital World, 2021), she’s a singer-songwriter and a well-known guitarist, she does a little work with Brian May. So – yes, she produced the album which is really exciting because she’s into all the Seventies stuff, like I am. She has a new studio at her home just outside of Nashville, and she’s got all this old gear, like a console from the Seventies, she had an old tape-machine that we got Michael Wagner to help us set up everything – and, yes, this is the first album cut at her new studio which is exciting. So that was great. She also has horses, so I was riding a horse in-between sessions, which felt very Tennessee.
AD: You’re not into recording on cutting-edge digital technology?
LJ: To be honest, I’m quite chill about it. I don’t really mind all digital. We only recorded drums and bass to tape, but we did the rest digitally. So – I don’t know, I’m not too fuzzy with all that. I have a lot of fun trying out the vintage stuff. I appreciate the warmth of the old technology. But I also appreciate what digital does for us. Whatever works for whatever you want to achieve in the moment. We always do a bit of a mix. We mix digitally, but then we roll it back onto tape so it’s kind-of – it’s a mix of analogue and digital.
AD: You take the best of both worlds?
LJ: Exactly. For sure.
AD: Nashville is an amazing place where even the buskers on the street-corner play to an intimidatingly high standard.
LJ: Did you go to Nashville’s Broadway? You walk down and it’s like the world’s best singers to left and right. It’s insane the level of talent there, it’s great. But it’s so inspiring, you know! I always think it can be so intimidating, or it’s actually – I always find it inspiring just to see great people and to see what they work on. I love the place. I just love being around artists.
AD: I’ve not heard your album fully yet, but you have lots of songs on YouTube.
LJ: Yes. I released an EP a couple of years ago, and now we’ve released three singles from the new album already – so three songs are out there. But the full album is in the works. We’re still finalising some mixes, and then we should be good to go, because we’re gonna press some vinyl copies too!
AD: It’s a good time for female artists.
LJ: For sure. Pop music is just… if you look at the charts, all of the Pop music is just female artists, we’re killing it and I love that because we have a lot of catching up to do. Same with Rock music, although I think it depends on the country. I find that in Germany there’s still a lot more… it’s a lot more male-dominated, but if you go to the UK – or America for that matter, even Rock guitar-music, it’s just lots of women. It’s normal now, which I love and appreciate.
AD: Your song ‘Walk To West Berlin’ has a Cold War fragility to its narrative, with Berlin Wall lookout posts in the video, but surely you’re not old enough to remember those days!
LJ: HaHa! No-no… that was a little bit before I was planned, but no, it was actually inspired by my family, my Mom’s family. She’s from Berlin – so my Nan always told me a lot of stories about those days. They lived in West Berlin but they had relatives in East Berlin and they would always go and visit them over there, and every single time they crossed the border checkpoint my Nan would smuggle stuff to the East, and she never got caught, luckily – lucky for us! But yes, she told me a lot of stories about the whole thing. And the interesting thing about that song was, I actually wrote it at Uni as a kind of homework Protest Song thing – I thought maybe I should write about something I can kind-of relate to? So I wrote that. And the funny thing was, at the same time that I wrote the song this movie came out called The Wall Between Us (2019, as Zwischen Uns Die Mauer) and it’s basically the same story as the song, it’s like a love-story between East and West Berlin – and a true story based on a book by this woman from Berlin, Katja Hildebrand, and the lead actress in that movie (Lea Freund) went to school with me, in this tiny town of Frankfurt-am-Main, we started when we were – like, twelve years old. And she’s the main actress there, so I got in touch with her and said ‘hey, this is kinda funny, I wrote this song at the same time.’ So she got me in touch with the director of the movie – Norbert Lechner, and he gave us the movie to use as a music-video. It was too late to have the sync thing, but it worked the other way round so that we could use clips for the video, so – I don’t know if you’ve seen the video? that’s from the film, which is pretty cool. But yes, the whole story, the whole thing was inspired by my Nan’s memories of smuggling stuff to East Berlin. People were like ‘oh, is this your video?’ and I’m like ‘No! that would have been a BIG budget, if we’d filmed all of that!’ But no, it’s from an actual movie.
AD: When you play live, you cover the Suzi Quatro song ‘The Wild One’. Was Suzi an influence?
LJ: Oh, for sure! You’ve seen the live show? I love her. I love Suzi. I always kind-of knew of her. But it was actually during the first pandemic, when it started, when I went back and I was in my little room by myself with a guitar and I started getting into Suzi Quatro and I honestly had the best time. I didn’t leave the house. I had my guitar, and I was just listening to Suzi and just rocking out, and I learned so much about her music, and it’s been so really inspiring, and then I read her biography as well which was also pretty cool (Unzipped, Hodder paperback, 2008). She was like the first woman to front a Rock band, really, and the way she talks about it, that she says she never… people were saying that she kept kicking down doors, and she was like ‘I didn’t even realise there were doors.’ Which is a great way to look at it too. Actually, I had a masterclass with her a few years back, and was able to say to her that I really appreciate what she’s done, and that I saw her quote about her not realising there were doors. I didn’t realise there were doors either – but I felt them. I didn’t see the doors, but I felt there was something missing. So just reading her story was very inspiring. And her music. Oh my god! Just a Rock Chick, and I love it. She’s been a big influence, especially in the last few years, for me.
AD: Which Pop Stars did you have blu-tacked to your bedroom wall when you were a kid?
LJ: Oh my god! Let me have a think (she laughs). If we mention that it’s going to be a little bit embarrassing, but do you remember Tokio Hotel (a German band who scored with German-language album Zimmer 483 in 2007), do you know them? They were massive. When they started they were like fourteen, but they got huge, it was insane, and they are huge in Asia as well these days. They have this one 2005 hit ‘Durch Den Monsun’, but that was on my first album (Schrei), I listened to them a lot. I had weird posters. But early stuff I listened to was – like, Springsteen, my Dad was like the biggest Springsteen fan, so he’s probably by far my biggest influence. I love him. My Dad played locally in a covers band, so all the seventies-eighties Rock stuff that my Dad’s band covered too. He never wrote songs. It was more like a hang-out once a week, and they played a few gigs a year. But they started when they were fifteen and were together forever, so that was cool. That’s where I had my first gig as well, at their thirtieth anniversary, when they’d played together thirty years, and they had a big show for that. And I went on stage, I think I was twelve years old, and I sang ‘Always’ by Bon Jovi. Yeah – big Bon Jovi fan too! That was the early days.
AD: Are all the songs on your album new original songs?
LJ: Yes. They’re all completely new. There’s a lot of songs I’ve never actually played live. Last weekend I played some support slots for the New Roses in Switzerland, it was a solo gig, but I tried out a few new songs, and they felt great actually, so I’m really excited about that.
AD: Leonie covers Janis Joplin’s and Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Me And Bobby McGee’. In concert she covers Bob Seger’s ‘Old Time Rock ‘n’ Roll’. You also perform a remarkably moving solo cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here’ on stage.
LJ: Oh! You saw that too. Thank you so much. I appreciate that. It’s one of my favourite songs, ‘Wish You Were Here’. I did that… I think it was the first encore of the show. I don’t actually listen to Pink Floyd that much, but that song is just… yeah! Very close to my heart. It’s a nice song to play solo as well.
AD: You always seem to enjoy performing, both live and when you’re making the music videos.
LJ: Oh! I’m always having fun, honestly. What’s the point…? I think it’s time for Rock stars to be happy (she laughs). There’s a lot of… obviously, I also listen to a lot of sad music, there are some days for that, but… being an artist a lot of people assume – or even artists themselves, they use their sadness as ‘I’m an artist, I’m some kind-of introvert and I have all these dark thoughts, and I write poetry and I have sad moods.’ There’s this whole thing with Pop music, the ‘sad girl aesthetic’ right now, and I’m like I love it, there’s some great songs out of sadness, I’ve written a lot of sad songs myself, but I also think it’s time to just… enjoy it! Just have fun and be happy, and if you go to a gig – like I keep saying, if you go to a Bruce Springsteen show his lyrics are so so good, but also his music, people are just HAPPY, they’re having so much fun, and everyone’s just smiling and stuff. I always want to have fun. And I always want people to leave a show feeling better than they did before. There’s something therapeutic about listening to sad songs and – y’know, crying for a bit, but I also think at some point, music can also have the opposite effect. Like, I remember there was one day when I got up and I was feeling down, so I thought I’ll put a record on, so I grabbed Imagine by John Lennon, and I was into listening to ‘Jealous Guy’ or something, and I thought… ‘you know what? No’ and I put on the Grease soundtrack, remember the film? And I just started dancing, I’m like – you gotta have such a happier life if you play happy music…
AD: ‘The power you’re supplying, is electrifying!’
LJ: Exactly. ‘You better shape up, ‘cause I need a man, and my heart is set on you’ (she sings). I’m always having fun. And I always want to have fun. Even if I’m not feeling it as much, you still have to go on stage and deliver, but then – it happens! Even if I’m not 100% in the mood beforehand, as soon as I’m onstage, and the first song starts, I’m like ‘yeah, this is fun.’ It’s all about the happiness (in her press release for ‘I Deserve To Shine’ she points out that ‘In this song, I’m taking a feminist stance. My message is loud and clear: happiness is something you fight for, and no-one has the right to take it away.’)
AD: For me it’s the Ramones, when I’m feeling down, my go-to-music to life my spirits is the Ramones.
LJ: That’s awesome. And Suzi Quatro, that’s what she does for me as well. You put it on and you just feel like a bad-ass. And you’re ready to tackle the day. I think it’s important to be aware what makes you happy and what gets you out of… you know, when you’re spiralling. Because I think a lot of people, when they’re spiralling, they tend to then go all into the sad stuff (she makes gestures with her hands to represent depression). And I’m like – No, we’ll put on some Springsteen or some Suzi and then we’re fine.
AD: Do you write poetry yourself, when you have your introvert moods?
LJ: Not as much. I’m not really… I’m more about the songs, I think. Usually when I write songs I do it on the guitar, so that I have the guitar, and I think about… I do obviously have – like, moments of thoughts, I have lots on my ‘notes-app’ on my phone, I have lots of little lines. But I don’t sit down and write a full poem. Apart from actually the ‘Berlin’ song – ‘Walk To West Berlin’, I wrote that more as a poem, and then turned it into a song. Apart from that I usually start with a riff or a chord-thing. I should do it more. I love…. I do actually enjoy writing poetry, but I’ve never really done it as much.
AD: So you don’t walk around jotting down ideas in a notepad?
LJ: Well, I have my phone and my ‘notes-app’, and I observe a lot and I talk a lot and listen a lot. So I’m travelling and I have all these conversations with people from everywhere, and I think I just channel that when I write songs. I’d rather go out and have conversations, and then I sit down with my guitar and channel it into a song, instead of just sitting around writing in my notebook all day. I’d rather just talk to people. But obviously I do have my phone and I write down little ideas and stuff when they come up.
AD: ‘Love me, hate me, let me go’ she demands on her 2020 debut single ‘Are You Lonely Enough?’ after the lovers have spent a loveless night together. I like that in the video for ‘Are You Lenely Enough’ you wear a Give Peace A Chance T-shirt. We could all do with some of that!
LJ: Oh yeah! I actually bought this at the Liverpool Beatles Museum. They had an exhibition for John & Yoko there years ago. And I went there a few times as well, it was a great exhibition. I bought it there. So yeah, that’s where the shirt is from.
AD: Is there anything else you particularly want to stress that we haven’t already talked about? About the album…?
LJ: For me, the most important thing is that people just enjoy it, you know? don’t take anything too seriously, just have fun listening to it. Obviously if there’s relatable stories in there, that’s great, but mainly just enjoy listening to it. That’s the main thing. There’s a lot of… to me, the album is – I’d say it’s kinda like a summary of my twenties, to me, I didn’t want my first album to be while I’m right in the middle of everything, figuring things out. To me now, this is the perfect time for my first album, because I’m in my late-twenties now and I feel like I’ve learned so much already – I’m obviously still very young, I know that, but in this first chapter, so much has kind-of settled down, like I have this one song on there called ‘The Life My Parents Had’ and it’s about that thing when you realise, like, when you grow up you always think your life is going to look like your parents life, I always assumed that OK, this is what I’m going to do, and then you grow up and you realise, oh no, it’s going to look completely different. Sometimes it makes me a bit sad because I see the amazing life that my parents had, but they didn’t have all these experiences I have now, because I do it a completely different way. Yes – so that to me is what the album is about. Lessons – lessons from your twenties, and lessons you’ll probably make a few more times the rest of your life. The album is called What Are The People Gonna Say, and – that’s the title song, basically the lyrics are ‘what are the people gonna say, if they find out it’s all just a game that we play, or if they find out we only live for today’ so it’s like – y’know, no, we shouldn’t care what the people say about us, it’s not that serious. It’s just about having fun. That’s what the album is saying.
AD: It’s your time to shine!
LJ: Yes! ‘I Deserve To Shine’ – that’s the other song. It’s kind like a ‘words of affirmation’ thing. ‘I worked my ass off to be here’ but ‘it’s the real me that is showing, when my joy is overflowing.’ I used to find it really hard to write happy songs… and I know a lot of people find it hard too, like I said I used to write a lot of sad songs because it’s easier to tap into that, I think, but yeah – so to me now the album is a lot of – like, words of affirmations. So I really want this, maybe I’ll get some kind of… But the song ‘I Deserve To Shine’ is something that’s really important to me. To allow yourself to shine brighter, and don’t hold yourself back, or let anyone keep you down! So, I hope people get that out of the album.
AD: ‘Don’t you turn it off!’ That’s a great note to close on.
LJ: Thank you so much.
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BY ANDREW DARLINGTON
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