Odie Leigh would never have called herself a musician before the depths of the 2020 pandemic, when her rapper roomies made a bet: Whoever records a song that goes viral first, wins. Slightly ticked off that they hadn't included her in the wager, she decided to hit them with her best shot, and Odie was crowned the victor when a track she wrote blew up on TikTok. "I was like, I'm gonna show y'all. I'm gonna win", she recalls, laughing. Then I woke up to a bunch of comments on TikTok being like, Oh my God, release this. This is amazing! Now, I'm a musician.
Four years after posting what she calls that silly joke song on TikTok, Odie Leigh has continued to transform and evolve as an artist from what she calls acoustic, ethereal folk sad girl music to a harder-edge tunes that flirt with early Aughts pop-punktivism. That trajectory culminates in her first LP, Carrier Pigeon. All the music I've released up until this point can kind of be thrown into the indie folk acoustic genre, Odie says. But I never set out to make Americana music. I never set out to make folk music. I'm just a girl with an acoustic guitar.