Lennon Stella

Singer/songwriter Lennon Stella’s path to a career in music has featured enough unexpected twists and turns to seem like the plot of a TV drama, which in her case is certainly appropriate. Lennon and her younger sister Maisy were the daughters of a Canadian country music duo, and thanks to their parents’ appearance on a televised talent competition, they were cast on the popular series Nashville, playing the daughters of a well-known country music star. After several seasons of playing a talented young vocalist, reality started to mirror fiction as Lennon began writing songs for the show, and in 2018 she stepped out as a solo with the EP Love, Me. Her more electronic-driven full-length debut, Three. Two. One. arrived in 2020.
Lennon Stella was born in Ontario, Canada on August 13, 1999, four years before her sister Maisy. The sisters are the daughters of Marylynne and Brad Stella, who performed as a duo called the Stellas. The husband-and-wife team got their big break when they appeared on the second season of CMT’s short-lived music competition series Can You Duet in 2009. The couple finished fourth — good enough to draw the attention of EMI Music Canada, which issued the self-titled The Stellas album in 2011. Lennon and her sister Maisy were eventually cast on Nashville as the daughters of the character Rayna James, portrayed in the show by Connie Britton.
Nashville debuted in October 2012, and only a few episodes into the show’s run, Lennon & Maisy performed the song “Telescope,” which appeared on the first of many soundtrack albums tied into the show. In 2013, Lennon & Maisy performed a cover of the Lumineers’ “Ho Hey” that was quickly released as a single and charted in both country and pop formats. Lennon & Maisy would go on to rack up greater single sales than any other Nashville cast members, and in the show’s fifth season, Lennon co-wrote four tunes featured on the series — “Saved,” “In Love,” “Clockwork,” and “Tennis Shoes.” In December 2016, Lennon duetted with Marc Scibilia for a seasonal single, a cover of John Lennon’s “Happy Xmas (War Is Over),” while the following year, she teamed with Barns Courtney for another Yuletide track, “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” The final episode of Nashville aired in July 2018, and Lennon wasted no time launching a solo career. She signed with a Columbia-distributed label, Records LLC, and dropped her first single, an acoustic version of her song “Like Everybody Else,” in August 2018. Her debut EP, Love, Me, followed later that year, and in 2020 she issued her long-awaited debut solo album, Three. Two. One., which had a largely electronic pop sound rather than the country slant on which she’d made her name. The album made it into the Top 100 on the Billboard charts and she followed up with 2021′s “Fancy” in a similar sonic vein. ~ Steve Leggett & Mark Deming