“I’m definitely going to be sad to leave St. Petersburg, that’s my [neighborhood], yo, and I pretty much grew up in Ybor.”
CL Music Editor Leilani Polk is checking in from the road, and decompressing from a weekend spent Phishing at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington state. She wasn’t defrauding people online, but rather getting down to one of her favorite bands at one of America’s most beautiful venues, which is just a two-hour drive from her new home in Seattle, Washington.
“Holy shit,” she says of the Gorge, a 27,500-seat outdoor amphitheatre overlooking the Columbia River, “that place is like... being in a painting.” It’s an insightful assessment, and a testament to the way music can act as a gateway to new perspectives and ideas.
In the last half-decade, Polk has served as a conduit for my own music writing. She — along with Tampa Bay Times/TBT* Newspaper pop culture critic Jay Cridlin and the team that built Suburban Apologist — gave me a place to fix my aural gaze on the Tampa Bay music scene, and provided me a platform from which to spill verbal diarrhea about the way that music made me feel. She let me wax on what I thought it meant to the community. Those posts provided paychecks and, more importantly, unfolded into even more opportunities to utilize words and other internet-y playthings to mine the rich, underexplored ecosystem of artists that make Tampa Bay an amazing place to be creative. In many ways, Polk and my other mentors gave me the life I have today, but as Leilani readied her change of addresses, I realized I knew relatively little about her.
Like her mom, Leilani was born in California; her dad was born in Indiana and went to Ball State. He fled to California after he graduated, met mom and then eventually relocated the family to Florida because his folks lived here. In her 2009 introduction letter to the readers of CL (as Music Editor — she’s been a staffer since ‘04), Polk candidly spoke of leaning on hip-hop to get her through childhood and about how her adolescence led her to Portishead, Tori Amos, Mazzy Star and The Cure. She also eerily foreshadowed the (de)evolution of the comment thread by citing an expletive-riddled correspondence she received from one not-so-happy Steely Dan fan who didn’t appreciate her assessment of a set at Ruth Eckerd Hall.
“[The] creamy grooves creeped into my aural subconscious,” Polk says now, admitting the Dan ultimately won her over. “My tastes expanded and I was able to better appreciate the production, musicianship and overall greatness.”
That’s not all that’s changed.
She’s grown less enamored with Axl Rose (“not the Axl I used to know”), and doesn’t watch as much MTV as she did when she was a kid (“just Teen Mom, plus I don’t have cable anymore”). Tampa Bay has changed her, too:
“I actually enjoy covering the local scene more than I do talking to musicians I’ve admired for however long or that I’m simply digging at the moment,” Polk says. “Covering the local scene has proven more fulfilling and enriching and gratifying and inspiring than I ever imagined.” She does acknowledge, though, how hard it is to keep up with the artists hustling day in and day out.
“It’s definitely difficult, but a lot of it has to do with making sure I’m out and talking to people who are equally immersed in it, out there in the trenches, and are turning me on to it,” she explained. It’s easy to miss something that’s going on if no one’s telling her about it or talking about it. “You can’t just expect me to know about something simply because it exists. I have to be hipped to it somehow, right?”
So she’s leaned on the community and behind-the-scenes folks like promoters, venue and bar owners as well as scenesters, friends with similar tastes in music and even the musicians themselves. All that love and endearment through hard work is evident in her writing, and in the most recent Music Issue, where she and her team of contributors thoughtfully profiled more than a dozen locals poised to “Breakout!” and shine hard for the Bay area.
She’s admittedly freaked out and thrilled at the next phase of her life, and knows that Tampa Bay’s creative class is the reason she stuck around for so long. She loves it here, and there’s no doubt her departure leaves a hole in Tampa Bay’s music coverage. “I’m sad to leave it, but I’m excited to see someone else come at it with a fresh head, and to explore an entirely new, huge scene in Seattle,” Polk said in closing.
“I grew up here. I’m not leaving because I don’t love it but because I feel like I need to grow creatively, to avoid becoming stagnant — anybody who makes art or creates can understand that feeling.”
