Jangly Indie Rock

“I started playing cello when I was five and guitar at 10. Then, I started playing out in downtown Chicago when I was still a kid, maybe around 13 or 14,” says singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Austin Hartley-Leonard. “I then had a cello scholarship and concentrated on that for a bit, but went back to playing in rock bands.” He now performs his own brand of “jangly indie rock” as Broken Anchor. Hartley-Leonard says that he derived his moniker from his song “Broken Anchor Blues,” about a trip he took to San Francisco “with a semi-psychotic woman.” He begins writing every day at 10 a.m., “no matter what,” and some of his musical influences include Band Of Horses, Phil Spector and PJ Harvey. After working as a solo
performer and scoring placements on several TV shows, Hartley-Leonard recently moved to Nashville, where he says the talent is overwhelming. (“The guy who delivers your pizza probably plays the guitar better than you will ever dream of playing.”) Broken Anchor’s first full-length release, Fresh Lemonade, “is an LP formed by cherry-picking tracks from three previous EPs and combining them with some new tracks,” he says. “I have new songs now, but am not sure how I’m gonna release them. I’m considering renting a hot air balloon and dropping them over all the hottest retirement communities in the Nashville area.” He will be recording through the end of the year, and then performing a handful of acoustic shows up and down the East Coast.