A tattered ticket stub from a great concert. An old photo of family and friends. We've all got mementos in our wallets, and 19-year-old singer-songwriter Lennon is no exception. She carries the original lyric sheet to "5:30 Saturday Morning," title track of her debut album, wherever she goes. Resolutely holding on to her own words, written in her own hand, may seem sentimental, self-nurturing, even sweet. And the song itself is a rich piano ballad redolent with pre-dawn, love-drunk emotion. But form a snap impression of the artist based on the tune--and the tender act of preserving it on paper as a kind of talisman--and you'll soon be sweeping up the shards.
"I've played punk and hardcore clubs, and I've played the most distinguished blues and jazz clubs. I've played with 30 different bands," Lennon recites, her matter-of-fact tone belying her youth. But while her experience can perhaps be justified--Lennon grew up just outside of Nashville, a.k.a. Music City, and has been writing songs since she was seven--her sound is an absolute head-spinner. Assaultive. Intense. Loud as a multi-vehicle collision and blistering as the fire that erupts in its aftermath.
From individuality anthems like "Morning," with its relentlessly ominous rhythm and guitars, and the cranked-up, pissed-off "Property of Goatfucker," to such love-is-hell pieces as bleak and treacherous first single "Brake Of Your Car" and "These Days," a storm of menacing guitars, sinister keyboards and monstrous background growls, it is obvious this girl is high on the hard stuff. Yet Lennon also uncannily merges the heavy with the heavenly on "Couldn't Breathe" and wields whisper on the hammering "Trying To Make Me." And yes, she's the same artist who aches on the delicate "Asking You" and the aforementioned title track.
Lennon's songwriting dexterity and flat-out gorgeous voice -- vigorous, passionate, defiant and feral but never strident or shrieky - attracted attention immediately. Like, immediately. "My first real show was in this small bar - me on keyboards, with a backup singer and a guitarist," she recalls. "It was a four hour-show, all original stuff. I was 15. Right after that, everyone started coming around. I've been dealing with labels for years."
Before that, Lennon's primary audience- not to mention mentor, collaborator and inspiration -was her mother, Kathleen Murphy, an aspiring songwriter. "I always just wanted to be like my mom," Lennon says. "She played piano a little bit, so I started taking lessons at age four. She wrote country stuff, and to spend time with her, I would fix it-the music or the lyrics. I started doing stuff by myself shortly after that - just being bored and screwing around on the piano." Floored by her daughter's talent, Kathleen assumed a management role, culling players from the Nashville scene, booking gigs and negotiating with the various record companies vying for the young artist. Meanwhile, Lennon's life was, "School-basically all honors classes-and between homework and tests I wrote songs and did shows."
A few days passed her 18th birthday-just as Lennon was about to graduate from high school and sign her record deal-tragedy struck: She arrived home from school to find her mother dead of an apparent allergic reaction. But Lennon herself couldn't fall apart; she became solely responsible for her eight-year-old sister, Mariella, whom she and her mom had been raising since the child was an infant. "I had to take care of her," Lennon says, explaining that an aunt (not the child's birth mother) suddenly decided that she wanted Mariella, and a fierce custody battle ensued. "I couldn't rest, I went right back to school because if I broke down-if it looked like I wasn't going on-Mary would be taken away from me," says Lennon, who has formally filed for adoption and hopes to see the situation soon resolved.
Suddenly finding herself without a mother--and becoming a mother herself--reinforced, rather than deterred, Lennon's musical goals: She needed her deal to support Mariella, and her own mom, of course, would have wanted Lennon to make her album. "My one stipulation was that we'd do the record here in Nashville, so when Mary got home from school my roommate could bring her to the studio," she says. In between "household stuff -cooking, cleaning and running around to soccer games," Lennon threw herself into the recording process. "We went in, worked our asses off and had it done in a month."
As to her music's genesis Lennon simply says: "Inspiration? Fuck ... life." The power struggles on 5:30 Saturday Morning reflect professional hurdles jumped: "In the music business, basically everybody wants you to be what they want," she explains, noting author Ayn Rand as a big influence "in terms of sticking to what you want to do." "You destroy the thing you love- guess I read The Fountainhead too many times!"
But Lennon isn't especially concerned about whether people understand exactly where she's coming from. "If they get it, they get it" she says. "What I really want is for people to relate to my music-to put their lives into my songs." It may not be a safe place, inside Lennon's songs, but anyone who's ever known pain, or passion, or power, will be drawn to 5:30 Saturday Morning. Any time of day. Any day of the week.
Source: http://www.lennononline.com/#
