Singer Leanne Binder has been a local favorite for years, but she hasn’t been a “local” singer for a long time. She’s performed in the UK, made several appearances at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and frequently travels to Nashville to record and to collaborate with other songwriters.

Radio is starting to take notice as well. She appears on the latest episode of the Sirius XM radio podcast “Breaking the Business,” which was released Monday. Her 2025 EP “I Got Something to Say” reached number 24 on the RMR (Roots Music Report) contemporary blues chart, and several of its songs have appeared on RMR’s various singles charts.

After getting input from others, Binder picked the EP’s title track as the single, but the blues radio hosts had their own ideas.

“I guess these blues guys, they all just pick what they really like, and then they start playing it,” she said. “I called Cornel (Bogdan, host of Y103’s ‘Tangled Up in Blues’). I’m like, is this normal? ‘Yeah, because they don’t like to be told what to play’…I’m just glad that the entire album is hitting the way it’s hitting.”

“I Got Something to Say” was recorded in Nashville with producer Lee J. Turner, who plays keyboard in Darius Rucker’s band. She connected with Turner through another friend, Paul Sanchez, who played in the ’90s alternative rock band Cowboy Mouth.

Turner also became one of Binder’s favorite writing partners, co-writing five of the six songs on the EP.

“I do co-writes down in Nashville regularly now,” Binder said. “Some people are really easy to be around. Things flow easily, and you get some good writes out of it. With Lee, it was instant. We have the same kind of sense of humor, which helps, and we both have strengths that the other one doesn’t carry with them.

“I’m a lyricist and I have a strong ear for hooks. Lee is a horn player too. I write a three-chord song, and it turns into 12 chords, because he brings in all this cool movement and production work that will then lead my ear in a completely different direction. It’s been just a lot of fun, and it’s easy with us.”

Even with the strong collaborative relationship with Turner, Binder described the EP as a very personal album with each song containing threads of her musical journey, culminating with “I Got Something to Say.”

And it’s been quite a journey. Those who know Binder only from bar band gigs covering artists like Janis Joplin with a self-described “whiskey-soaked” voice may be shocked to know Binder grew up singing Italian arias and studying opera.

She started taking voice lessons at age 12 with Rosemary Raridon and Wade Raridon from Youngstown State University’s Dana School of Music.

“Years and years later, I found out that they told my parents that they had a responsibility to train my voice, that they thought that there was something in it,” Binder said.

The techniques she learned from them helped her get accepted to a prestigious collegiate voice program, but the different vocal approach taught there damaged her voice and took away her upper register. She dropped out of college and went back to studying with the late Rosemary Raridon, who Binder credits with saving her voice.

Binder isn’t sure whether she would have stayed with opera had she not encountered the vocal issues she had at college.

“I knew I wanted to be a vocal artist, but everything happened so young for me that I don’t know that I really formulated where I wanted to be. There were all of these things I wanted to try. But being that the foundation of where I came from was opera, I sang opera, and I liked it because there were big notes, like Freddie Mercury. It happened so young in my career, and then me finding my way out of that, I think I just fell into songs that resonated into my heart. That’s where the blues really hit home, and finding that outlet became a part of who I was.”

But whether she’s singing Led Zeppelin or one of her originals, Binder is relying on the same techniques she used to sing arias, and it’s what she teaches to her voice students, which range from children to adult singing professionals.

These days Binder is spending more time singing what she hopes will be her hits instead of covering the hits of others. For her full band gigs, the rule she established is playing a setlist focused on her songs with no more than two or three covers. Her solo and duo gigs feature more of a mix, but Binder said she’s been finding receptive audiences in those venues where audiences traditionally only want to hear songs they already know.

“I just start mixing it in and telling stories,” Binder said. “I’ve tried to turn my shows more into a singer-songwriter experience. There’s always the Joplin and there’s the stuff that people want to hear, but I tell stories and try to bring them in through the telling of the stories of these songs. Then they’re interested in hearing it. People have responded to it, and they want to hear more of it, so that’s just very exciting for me.”