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.”
