It’s the kind of story that merits a pretty great country song — but not the kind about beer and trucks and flags and horses.  No, this would be the kind of country song telling the extraordinary true story about a real woman finding — well into full-grown adulthood — her voice as an artist and a brand-new sense of purpose in life. It’s the kind of story that merits the kind of country song that a woman like Leslie Waugh might write and sing, because it’s her story. 

“My 20^th wedding anniversary was coming up, and I told my now ex-husband I really want to go to Hawaii.  But he decided that instead of us going to Hawaii, I was going to go to a songwriter workshop in Port Arthur, Texas, for a weekend with Terri Hendrix and Lloyd Maines.” She pauses to laugh. “I was like, ‘OK ... what?  It just didn’t make any sense to me at all,” she says. “But he ended up giving me something I didn’t even know I needed. I went into the workshop thinking it would be a weekend away from home and kids, and I’d hang out with cool people who I admire.  So why not? On the last day there’s a student concert.  Lloyd approached me and told me I should play my song that I’d just written the week before.  It was my first song – you know, to have something, right? Lloyd told he would accompany me on guitar, and I was like, ‘Lloyd Maines is going to back me up? Yes!’ That weekend I decided to just say yes to everything, and it changed my life.”

After that fateful workshop, Leslie began her musical journey in earnest, taking guitar and voice lessons, showing up at open mics, and joining songwriter groups to hone her craft.  Recognition soon followed when the Houston Songwriter Association honored her with Songwriter of the Year and Song of the Year.  At the time, she was the first woman to be given both top honors in the same year.  Naturally her next step was recording her debut record The White Cat Sessions, released in 2011. Ironically, more than one of her songs on the album foretold the end of her first marriage.  Determined to move forward, Leslie continued her musical journey and found herself working with her heroes Maines and Hendrix as co-producers on her critically acclaimed follow-up album, on.ward, released in 2014. 

In 2018 Leslie had a dozen new songs and the resources to begin a new recording project.  But just like one of her songs about life’s disappointments, Leslie found herself at an impasse with her third record.  “I started this project with a producer in the Austin area.  He brought in some good musicians to play on it, but I ended up pulling the plug in the eleventh hour because I realized he and I were nowhere near being on the same page as far as what I wanted the record to sound like,” she says. “All the time and money and I had to pull the plug.  It was heartbreaking, but the songs just didn’t sound right.  It took two years before I could think of salvaging something from that experience.  When I was ready my husband imported the songs to our home studio and we started peeling back the layers of the onion. I found four songs we could save.  I brought in a guitar player to lay down new parts, and then we remixed them into what became the first Vignettes from a Woman’s Serenade EP.” 

With her motivation and enthusiasm restored, Leslie seized the opportunity to invent her next project. Vignettes from a Woman’s Serenade would be a series of EP’s, a trilogy.   As she explains it, “each one told its own story, every song is just a separate scene,” she continues, “snippets of life, love, disappointment, happiness, whatever life might be. Even if it may not always be my truth, it could be somebody else’s truth — and always from a woman’s perspective.”  This time she would keep one hand on the production steering wheel.  Leslie joined forces with a familiar face, Pat Manske, recording engineer at The Zone in Dripping Springs, Texas to co-produce with her.  He was the recording engineer for her on.ward record.  Those EPs, incidentally, are Leslie’s first releases since remarrying in 2018 and changing her last name from Krafka to Waugh — a true act of love on her part, given the not-for-the-faint-of-heart hassle of any name change, let alone for a performing artist. But it further underscores just how empowering and freeing a woman’s serenade can be. When the first EP launched in the spring 2022, Leslie quickly followed it with Volume II at the end of the year.  Then completed the series with Volume III in the fall of 2023. 

Now, in 2026, we find Leslie with another full-length record Night Bloom in full swing.  Once again Leslie has joined forces with Pat Manske at The Zone with a ten-song collection.  “I’m excited to be making a full-length record again.  I have so much more room to say what I want through these songs.  It’s a blend of folk influences and a contemporary Americana sound, with a dash of honky-tonk.  It’s eclectic as it flows between driving alt-county tunes to folky bittersweet tales.”  Although production is ongoing, Leslie hopes to have a release date for Night Bloom in the spring or early summer of 2026.

Though Leslie may have stumbled into songwriting, she not only quickly found her footing, but she made her mark as well.  The unique story of how Leslie first found her better-late-than-never calling as a Texas troubadour is inspiring.  “I think when you’re young, you have your own identity and you belong just to yourself, but after decades of children and marriage and work and all these other things, it can be easy to lose that — especially for a woman,” Leslie reflects. “But music gave a real sense of personal identity back to me. I wasn’t just somebody’s mom or wife or employee — I am a songwriter. This is what I do, it’s who I am, and nobody can take that away from me.”