Los Angeles pop-jazz band Leftover Cuties returns to Fresno

Shirli McAllen wants a redo.

The last time she was in Fresno with her band Leftover Cuties she had just had surgery to remove a benign tumor from her brain. The audience may not have noticed, but the singer was in the midst of a recovery that included anti-seizure medications. It was a difficult time.

“I became a kind of stranger to myself,” says McAllen, in advance of the band’s show Saturday, Sept. 12, at the Tower Lounge inside Fresno’s Tower Theatre.

This is the third trip to Fresno for the Los Angeles band and is a chance for McAllen to reconnect with local fans.

“I’m excited to be back and feeling like myself,” she says.

The Leftover Cuties play acoustic, jazz-laden pop music. It’s 1920s speakeasy tunes reimagined as contemporary “noir-pop.” Before McAllen’s surgery the band was riding some momentum and had music featured as the theme song for the Showtime series “The Big C” and in commercials for Hyundai, Samsung and Ikea.

The surgery forced the band to take some time off. Shows were canceled. Some of the members got day jobs to make ends meet, McAllen says: “We definitely felt like we lost a lot of time.”

Only now is the band is back up and running. It spent the summer writing new material (inspired by everything that has happened) and playing as many shows as possible on a tour of the Midwest and East Coast.

McAllen felt artistic pressure putting her experiences into lyrical form: “That was kind of paralyzing.”

But in playing live, she relearned how to be on stage, how to perform as herself, she says.

Over the next few months, the Cuties will work out the arrangements for the new songs, then head into the studio to record. The final product will be a mix of what McAllen calls classic Cuties and a new, more serious, side of the band.

“It’ll be the best of both worlds,” she says. “There’s a lot of material we have to polish.”

This story was originally published September 10, 2015 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Los Angeles pop-jazz band Leftover Cuties returns to Fresno."