Orchestra music, ukuleles, and conceptual songwriting come together to create a raw new sound.
An artist’s sound often reflects the many influences that shape it, similar to the geographical layers that are explored in the latest project Compass from Leaf in a Forest. With a career spanning more than two decades, Josh Falling, the artist behind the project, brings both his seasoned talent and his unique perspective to the contemporary indie scene. The band’s current work, a third streaming album, is a project that continues the artist’s ongoing journey into thematic explorations and experimental soundscapes.
Celebrating the Roots of Music
Leaf in a Forest’s artistic journey has been shaped by classical and technical training. With a family history that includes a professional musician father, a cousin in opera, and an uncle who plays French horn for the German Opera, Falling’s complex musical arrangements are hardly accidental. Falling is proficient across a number of instruments, and his songwriting draws inspiration from the creative musicality of Twenty One Pilots, while his sound echoes the energetic 2000s pop-punk he enjoyed in his youth, including blink-182, New Found Glory, and Yellowcard. Taken together, Falling has used his influences to create a distinct framework for his melodies and storytelling.
Leaf in a Forest lives in a specific sonic niche created by synthesizing seemingly disparate sound textures. The music uses the bright, organic timbre of the ukulele as a primary lead, but with the support of an expansive, cinematic orchestral sound. The two elements, generally considered far apart artistically, create a sweeping environment for lyrics that remain intentionally young and vulnerable.
And rather than sticking to the confident messaging so common to much of mainstream pop today, the songs capture the nuances of anxiety and uncertainty tinged with the struggle that comes with social displacement. Falling deliberately chooses emotional vulnerability, which results in a uniquely bittersweet and unconventional sound.
On Songwriting and Navigating the Indie Rock Scene
Each of Falling’s albums is built around a central premise, with individual tracks orbiting that core theme. Previous projects, such as Galleria, which uses famous paintings as its aesthetic guide, and Ampersand, which takes on specific linguistic challenges, have generated a clear precedent for Compass. This new project reflects the artist’s interest in exploration and the discovery of new horizons, either literally or those simply within the mind. And Falling’s approach to track-laying means that the album functions as a complete, overarching narrative rather than merely a collection of loose ideas.
Despite occupying a space in a deeply saturated digital marketplace, Leaf in a Forest has developed a dedicated audience. Among the project’s milestones are 250,000 streams for the track “Pirate Ships & Fairy Tales” and a total of 500,000 streams across the entire catalog. The project and its audience fit well into a unique digital entertainment pocket, with each new album acting as a vehicle for the project’s continued growth, which includes over seven million views on TikTok, mostly driven by the track “The Summit.”
By maintaining his active presence on platforms such as Instagram, Falling continues to connect with an audience that values conceptual music and emotional turbulence. His project, ultimately, acts as a study in how unique orchestral elements can be successfully absorbed into the popular indie rock landscape.
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