The Album Leaf

The ambient music of one-man band the Album Leaf, aka Jimmy LaValle, has drawn comparisons to Brian Eno and other deep thinkers of contemporary electronic rock. But LaValle may be the most unpretentious record maker you'll ever meet. He names Stevie Wonder, Billie Holiday, Jay-Z and Justin Timberlake as favorites. If anything, LaValle wants to demonstrate the human element behind the sometimes otherworldly feel of ambient rock. That, and he wants to set the record straight about so-called serious artists such as himself. "I think there's a whole misconception [about] people who play any kind of music that's remotely emotional," he says. "People on the outside world just feel like, 'Oh, they must be some kind of starving artist.' There's just that classic stereotype...people think that a person that does any kind of emotional music has some kind of pain or some kind of this or some kind of that. And, of course, there are those kinds of people. But the reality is everyone is just their own person. "