Dressed in denim, a tall and youngish singer was telling the half-full weekend crowd at Sultan Room about his latest album. “This song is about this June character and I’ll be exploring her all night,” said De’Wayne, a singer from Houston, by way of LA. That was the title of his third album, which was peculiarly coming out at the end of July; De’Wayne said that this was because you can’t control everything in life, especially not the machinations of record labels. He was on his second of those, so far; the Culver City pop-punk indie label Fearless Records signed him last year; he had been on the similarly-named, but entirely different, Hopeless Records before then. A talented and expressive singer, cast in the sees-themself-as-Prince mold, he jumped around his two-piece band with the committed ferociousness of a committed choir leader. At one point, he kissed both bandmates. Later, he led them through a stirringly faithful cover of an old Stooges record.

If the milling crowd of mostly very young teenagers were largely indifferent to all this, this was because they were here to see Red Leather, a singer from Reno, by way of LA, with over a million followers on TikTok. Red Leather, who never shows his face or reveals his legal name, reads a profile in the Reno News & Review. Instead, he wears an elaborate red outfit, complete with a candy red fringed Stetson. If you look under the fringes, he is also wearing a mask. By being anonymous, I can fully talk about my life and my addiction and my recovery without having to be judged by what I look like or who I am—anything like that he tells the Reno News, which reports that many of Red Leather’s songs are based on true stories about his time as an addict, and how his journey to sobriety also led him to spirituality. 

In Bushwick, the latest stop on his Put It All On Red tour, he appeared in a red leather jacket and donning a beaded bracelet that read C*CAINE; he sang songs about doing drugs, dealing drugs, and finally about feeling a numb sensation of nothing at all from all the drugs he was doing, dealing, etcetra. He was sober now, he said. Nearby, a child who could not be more than 14 or 15 had jumped up and down in thrilled joy when Red Leather started singing the beginning of “Sins,” one of his more popular records. It goes “father, forgive me, I’m sorry for my sins, so tired of living.” The music he peddled was a nicely relaxed line between midwest acts like Twenty One Pilots or Quinn XCII, if somewhat gospel-inflected at times, but never distractingly so. Which is to say that it was peculiarly closer to radio, at any rate, than anything that, say, the similarly-masked cowboy Orville Peck would record. (Peck has since gone unmasked on the Broadway stage.) When Mr. Red Leather decided finally to take off his jacket, but not his mask, he’s wearing a black t-shirt with thick gold letters that read Father, Forgive Me.

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