On Sleeping Lion, Lennon Stella Cuts Through the Noise

I was 14 years old when I first encountered Lennon Stella. I was on the family computer watching the singer, then aged 12, and her 8-year-old sister Maisy perform a cover of Robyn’s “Call Your Girlfriend” on YouTube with an empty butter container and a brown paper backdrop. You might have had a similar experience if you’re one of the 31 million viewers who have seen the video.

Shortly after their viral breakout in 2012, the Stella sisters were booked for the ABC hit music drama Nashville, which Lennon starred in from ages 12 to 18. Before the show ended, she had a record deal. She dropped her debut EP in 2018, followed by her 2020 full-length album, Three. Two. One. Then the pandemic hit, and she, like all of us, retreated home. But long after most emerged, Stella stayed in her cocoon for years, leaving fans to wonder if she would ever drop new music again. Now she’s finally releasing her sophomore album, Sleeping Lion, on October 23.

Stella, 27, is warm when I meet her at Bar Oliver in New York City’s Chinatown on a September afternoon. She has that same raspy yet melodic voice she had as a kid. Wrapped in a coat and scarf, she sips a coffee, and we talk about where the hell she’s been for the last six years.

Home, mostly, it turns out. She’s been hanging out with friends and watching “a shit ton of movies.” It was the first time she realized she could call a career time-out. “I was going pretty consistently since I was a kid,” Stella says, referring to her early acting days.

But at the same time, Stella is trying to re-create a feeling she had while working on Nashville. “There was a purity about it,” she says. “I would say that’s the thing I loved the most and the thing I want to keep with me now.” As she tells it, she and Maisy were shielded from much of the industry’s influence. “For the first five seasons, they were like, ‘No acting coach. No one touch them.’ And they let both my sister and I do whatever felt natural.” She’s missed that feeling.

“I just felt like I knew what I was doing. Nobody was questioning me, and I wasn’t questioning myself.” It was around this time that she got into the music industry, which changed all of that. The litany of influences and opinions around her muddied the water, and Stella says she got lost and confused. The result, she admits, was a gap between the music she was making and the music inside her. “Now I’ve come back to the place of remembering what I felt really sure of on Nashville. And if you go back to what feels genuinely true and honest, that’s where the good stuff is.”

It’s hard to bring up Nashville without mentioning the August passing of Hayden Panettiere, who played Stella’s on-screen mentor. It’s too fresh to discuss when I meet Stella, but in a recent Rolling Stone interview, she alternated between talking about Panettiere in the past and present tenses, belying a tender truth: to Stella, her absence doesn’t feel real, not yet. I ask if, when she is ready to talk about the loss, she might do it through music. “I don’t know yet,” Stella says. “But maybe.”

If we’re comparing this album to her previous one, Sleeping Lion sounds more folk than pop and reads more like a diary entry and less like a script. It’s clear that this music is purer and truer to Lennon’s nature. “This record is a return to what I have loved since I was a kid,” she says. Her vocals still coo like a salve for your nervous system, only now they are accompanied by pared-back instrumentals rather than upbeat synths. These tracks feel more aligned with what Stella listens to when she’s alone, artists like Nick Drake, Connie Converse, and Canadian singer-songwriter Andy Shauf, who’s both a major inspiration for her and now a producer on Sleeping Lion. Working with Shauf, Stella says, was incredible. “It felt like when you’re a kid in your bedroom and nobody’s listening and you’re just playing.”

Stella practiced “being terribly honest” on this album, and her longtime collaborator Simon Wilcox urged her to write without fear of how her songs’ subjects might react. “At times in the past, I’ve avoided [being too honest in lyrics] because I’ve been trying to be conscientious of people’s opinions—and airing someone else’s dirty laundry,” she says. Of course, when I hear this, my mind goes to potential lovers, but Stella assures me this isn’t about a boyfriend. Her boyfriend, in fact, has the opposite effect. “He’s the safe one,” she says of Jegor Venned, her partner for the last seven years. “He’s like, ‘I want you to write from your deepest, truest place and never worry.’ It’s been a very healing thing for me, having a consistent, loving twin soul in my life.” For once, we can’t blame the boy.

“A big part of all this was learning how to make room for myself to have my own experience and perspective and not be so aware of what everyone else needs or wants from me,” she says. This is, in part, where the album title comes from. The Sleeping Lion was a tarot card she pulled. “There was a lot of this time in the six years that was about me awakening the sleeping lion within, of finding my sense of self and going back to what I was before I was so concerned about other people’s perception of me,” she explains.

Stella tells me she’s interested in acting again eventually, but for now, she’s given us a cozy fall album to soothe our souls. She’s back onstage, too, performing shows for her Up Close & Personal tour in Nashville, New York, Toronto, and Los Angeles throughout October and November. She’s excited to be face-to-face with listeners again. “I feel like I’ve been in a bit of a vacuum for the past six years, just writing the songs and not having them go anywhere,” she says. “I need the conversation part.”

She’s good at the conversation part. Maybe it’s her kindhearted disposition, or our proximity in age, or the fact that I’ve been privy to her star power for exactly half my life, but Stella seems to cast an easygoing glow around her—one that I’m happy to bask in as we chat. In many ways, her earnest explorations of life and love make her feel like a mirror for late 20-somethings like me. I’ll continue rooting for her for the next 14 years, or however long she chooses to continue making music.