About this Event
WELCOME BACK! Wild Honey Backyard 2026 Season.
We have renovated our space in anticipation of the 2026 shows. We resurfaced the seating area, added hand-made, redwood stained memorial benches, new stage lights, and 20 foot waterfall stream alongside the upper tier!
For our first event, Wild Honey welcomes two wonderful singer/songwriters, Leslie Mendelson and Skylar. Both women, have delivered stellar perfornances at our big shows over the years. Leslie's version of Warren Zevon's "Mutineer' at the 2025 Join Me in LA event was brilliant and Skylar's performances at the Beatles White LP show, the Big Star shows, and a great backyard were all amazing. We are thrilled to have them back to showcase their new music!
Doors at 330. Their will be food, drink, and music for sale! Street Parking is available. Be prepared to walk up the Kipling Hill to reach our hilltop home! Thanks!
LESLIE MENDELSON:
With her enchanted voice and evocative songwriting, Leslie Mendelson has won the hearts and minds of both an adoring fanbase and fellow artists alike. No less than Jackson Browne has declared, “Leslie's melodies are timeless. They reach me way back in my youth somewhere. I hear traces of Burt Bacharach and Carole King, and hooks and passages that remind me of the pop songs I grew up hearing on the radio,” while The Wallflowers frontman Jakob Dylan shares: “Voices like Leslie’s can get away with almost anything. Along with being a great songwriter, this leaves her with few if any peers.”
A Grammy Award-nominated artist, Mendelson returns this summer with her fourth studio album,After The Party. For this latest effort, she collaborates with not one, but three producers: the legendary Peter Asher (James Taylor, Linda Ronstadt, Bonnie Raitt), the young, in-demand Tyler Chester (Madison Cunningham, Sara Bareilles, Sara Watkins) and her longtime songwriting partner, three-time Grammy Award-winner, Steve McEwan. Recorded at Jackson Browne’s studio Grove Masters in Santa Monica, CA, she was joined by an ace band featuring guitarists Waddy Wachtel and John Jorgenson, bassists Leland Sklar and Derrick Anderson, and drummers Jim Keltner and Abe Rounds.
“Collaboration was so important to me with these songs. My previous album,If You Can’t Say Anything Nice…looked inward and was often colored by the dark socio-political climate circa 2018 and 2019 when it was written. Throw in the pandemic during which it was released, and it just became really clear that I needed to have fun making music again,” explains Mendelson. “When the opportunity presented itself to have both Tyler and Peter produce me, along with Steve who’s been with me since the very beginning of my career, it felt as if the stars had aligned and were demanding that I indulge in the joy of creating with all of these musical geniuses who wanted to work together.”
ThroughoutAfter The Party’s ten tracks, Mendelson crafts a distinctive folk-rock, pop-Americana flavor, evoking the sounds of Laurel Canyon, but with the downtown grit and sharp wit of Brooklyn, the city she has called home for over two decades now. There’s a refreshing realness and effortless musicality that feels both nostalgic and new on songs like “Rock And Roll On The Radio,” “Signs Of Life,” and “I Know A Lot Of People.” The album’s first single “Other Girls” is an intoxicating twist of aural voyeurism mixed with a healthy dose of sexual openness. Its chorus suggestively musing, "I like it, I said I like it when you talk about other girls.”
"‘Other Girls,' is about women empowering women,” says Mendelson. “Who doesn’t love women?! It’s also another way of looking at conventional relationships and indulging in fantasy. A bit of commentary on the ever-changing world we live in.”
Other standout tracks, “Have a Little Heart,” "The Good Life” and the title track offer warm musings on a life worth living and a newfound appreciation for the little things.
“I would love for this record to connect,” said Mendelson. “I think there’s something in there to speak to people. There are personal moments, there are moments of fun, where you can turn it up loud and sing along, and there are moments of reflection. This record is an emotional journey, and I hope that people can take it with me.”
“Leslie is one of these very rare singers who can combine elegant precision with the soul and emotional resonance of a deeply moving writer and performer,” concludes producer, Peter Asher. "She has a remarkable voice and one we need to hear.”
Leslie Mendelson |After The Party
Available June 21 on Vinyl, CD & Digital
via Pasadena Records / Royal Potato Family
For more information on Leslie Mendelson,
please contact Kevin Calabro at Calabro Music Media:
917.838.4613 or [email protected]
SKYLAR GUDASZ
“It’s wild, the ways that humans try to make boundaries out of things.” With her third LP, COUNTRY, Gudasz interrogates borders of land and sea, mind and body: the limits of the lines we draw for ourselves.
Gudasz has concentrated her attention on matters of the mind and heart, last issuing a solo record with 2020’s Cinema (“★★★★ a career-making star turn” —MOJO) after her 2016 debut Oleander (“the Joni Mitchell the South never had” —Bitter Southerner). Between her LPs, Gudasz has registered a long list of extracurricular credits, taking up playing in the live bands of Hiss Golden Messenger, Eric Bachmann, Big Star’s Third, and spearheading the Ask Me Anything super trio tour with Libby Rodenbough and Kate Rhudy. She’s staked out her own poetic corner as a songwriter, drawing upon influences that span rootsy surf, witchy rock and roll, cinematic Southern twang, and dreamy art-pop.
A turquoise underdog of a semi-hollowbody guitar that Gudasz dug out of a closet became the songwriter’s conduit to an album as she worked out the shimmering “Fire Country,” around which eight more songs fell into place (“They followed me around like a humming cloud and I just tried to show up to finish them.”). Daily walks in the woods deepened the connections that Gudasz felt with the natural world. “A lot of the songs were written in movement, and then after walking, coming back, and putting them on the piano,” she says.
Gudasz recorded most of COUNTRY with her longtime pal Ari Picker, whose self-built Goth Construction studio in nearby Pittsboro made for a potent outpost for their work. The pair occasionally recorded outside, giving numbers a glow of ephemeral ambiance.
As Gudasz tangles with the contradictions and unanswerable questions of her being, COUNTRY pierces at the human desire—the need—to live free, unbound, unlimited.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Wild Honey Foundation Backyard Amphitheatre, 1167 Kipling Avenue, Los Angeles, United States
USD 23.18 to USD 44.52
