Get the latest Syracuse news delivered right to your inbox.
Subscribe to our newsletter here.

Joanie Leeds sat at the 2018 Grammy Awards, furiously writing notes on her phone. After singer Alessia Cara was one of the few women to win an award that night — snatching Best New Artist — she felt angry about the lack of female representation in the music industry.

“I was so upset that women were just basically not getting any awards and barely any nominations that year either,” said Leeds, a Syracuse University alumna.

Along with her experience at the Grammys, Leeds was also upset after seeing an Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study about the music industry, discovering women are underrepresented across the field.

Leeds felt that night at the 2018 Grammys created a buzz for women in the music industry and many left inspired to do something. About a year later, she created “All the Ladies,” an album for kids that won a Grammy in March.

From producer Lucy Kalantari to female mixing engineer Denise Barbarita and mastering engineer Emily Lazar the album consists of an all-women team. The tracks are about lifting other women up, female empowerment and gender equality.

For Kalantari, creating the all-female team was a “real eye-opener.” When looking for bass players for the album she realized how excluded women are from the average music conversation.

“I got 25 male bass players. I was like, ‘Where are the girls?’” Kalantari said. “It was so wild.”

The album features songs about everything from shattering glass ceilings to beauty standards. Her song “Rbg” — a nod to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg — explains what it’s like to be a woman and how much women have to overcome.

Leeds wrote and recorded the music video for the song before Ginsburg died. But after her death, Leeds noticed the song getting a lot of traction and received pictures of kids dressing up as the legendary judge and dancing to the song.

“Through the song, so many kids just felt such a connection with her, too,” Leeds said.

Leeds showed up to her audition for the musical theater program at SU in jeans and a T-shirt, unaware that there was a dancing component to the interview. Being a terrible dancer, she fell on her face and ran out of the room hysterically crying.

Despite this, she was later accepted and while at SU, she struggled as a musical theater major in the College of Visual and Performing Arts. She wasn’t one of the favorites and never got cast in anything so instead, she put her time into songwriting where found herself in practice rooms writing music while everybody else was auditioning for school plays.

After college, Leeds moved to New York City to follow her dreams of pursuing music. But, unlike most of her friends who were auditioning for theater, she followed her passions for songwriting and singing. She started hanging out in Greenwich Village playing at downtown clubs and bars such as Arlene’s Grocery, Living Room and The Bitter End.

Leeds and her daughter Joya sat in the kitchen as they listened to Dua Lipa announce Leeds’ album “All the Ladies” earned a 2021 Grammy nomination Courtesy of Edgar GZ

After three or four years, she became burnt out and her friend suggested she work with kids. Leeds, knowing nothing about kids, got a job at a preschool gym studio, Gymboree, playing music. It was the first job she had where she felt she could sing and be herself, which she liked.

“If you can show them and teach them these life lessons when they’re 3, 4 or 5 years old, then I think like anything else, if you teach love, they’re going to love,” Leeds said. “If you teach them to hate, they’re going to hate.”

After a couple of years managing the Gymboree location on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, she realized she could do this on her own and left to start writing her own children’s music and performing at birthdays.

Since then, Leeds has released nine children’s albums and has played at music festivals like Lollapalooza. She said that being a children’s musician most of her shows are on the weekend or over the summer.

This past January, Leeds sat around her kitchen table with her 5-year-old daughter Joya, listening to Dua Lipa announce that her ninth children’s album “All the Ladies” was nominated for a Grammy. She described the moment as “just so cool.”

Leeds and producer Lucy Kalantari taking a photo before the 2021 Grammy Awards show. Courtesy of Edgar GZ

Barbarita, who’s never met Leeds in person, said she was in bliss when she found out the album was nominated. But she said that “at the end of the day, Grammys aren’t the reason to make an album.”

“The reason is to touch people’s hearts,” Barbarita said.

In a normal year, Leeds would have traveled to Los Angeles and walked the red carpet, but due to COVID-19 she attended the event from her house. Still eager to get dressed up for the night, Leeds posted in her local Upper East Side moms Facebook group — the “UES Mommas” — that she had just been nominated for a Grammy and was looking for a dress. The post received hundreds of responses and thousands of likes, she said.

Through the post she connected with a stylist at BlancHouse who found Leeds a multicolor sequin dress that she ended up wearing to the virtual Grammys.

While the success and celebration has been exciting, putting together an all-female team was something Leeds and Kalantari hoped would not only make waves in the children’s genre but also in all of the genres of music.

“The idea that like this exists I think is amazing,” Kalantari said. “I wish I had this album growing up.”

Published on April 19, 2021 at 10:43 pm