Leena Culhane, pronounced LENN-uh Cul-HAYNE, is an interdisciplinary artist splitting residency between Los Angeles and Nashville.
In 2018, Leena set to work producing her fifth record in her small home studio in a tiny house in East Nashville. Nearing the end of its completion, an ill-fated break in took her computer, the backup drives, and the journals that held the record's written history. After taking some time to process what was lost, she enlisted the help of producer/multi-instrumentalist Justin Glasco, and the two embarked on piecing together the iteration of the record that was meant to find its way into wider scope. Sleepwalker is slated for release March 27, 2020.
Ever the libra, Sleepwalker is about the liminal space that has woven itself into the tapestry of her life. Settling on the visual of somnambulance brought much to the surface as she began to notice the places in her inner-world that fell asleep easily (or repeatedly hit snooze). “The title is two-fold: it evokes a sort of dreaminess and an openness that I was exploring in my music, and it also references these unconscious spaces that made me feel I was safe but really, I was hiding. I thought that averting my gaze would make the fear disappear, but all it ever did was hold me back. Shining some light on those darker corners through this record has been edifying, challenging, and ultimately healing. Everything is a work in progress. I believe that we are never just one thing, and that giving ourselves permission to be more prismatic is a freedom and a right.” Duality is intrinsic to this record and to her life.
Leena started playing piano at an early age, learning to read notes before words. Music lessons as a child opened up a new universe of composition and, eventually, songwriting that Leena took with her into her young adult life. She spent her teens playing with San Francisco-based bands as a keyboardist and later a guitarist, which eventually lead to opening for local luminaries such as Bonnie Raitt and The Dead. Years of backing up other bands and playing solo gigs around the Bay Area allowed her to hone a growing love of performance, including work as an actor at San Francisco’s American Conservatory Theater.
Her work in the Bay Area earned her a spot in the Acting program at the School of Theater, Film, & Television at UCLA where, among other things, she focused on the imperatives of keen observation and true connection in her storytelling. She followed up her EP (released in her high school years) by producing and self-releasing her first full-length album, Songs for the Record, while in her junior year of college. Leena graduated from UCLA with degrees in both Theater and Comparative Literature, and quickly set to work co-founding Blue Flamingo, a collaborative company that workshops and devises site-specific, immersive performance in New York and LA.
After graduating from college, Leena stayed in Los Angeles to pursue her various creative endeavors, releasing another EP and touring the US as a solo artist in her trusty Prius. While promoting The Reckoning EP, a small run of Southern dates took her to Nashville for the first time, where she quickly found a familiar feeling of home. A few months later she packed her car and headed to Tennessee for the summer to tap the uncharted wells stirring within. Time spent in a new environment, in solitude, and amidst the creative aquifer shaped the content of 2016’s Storm and the Fire, which she co-produced with Jd Tiner. The album explores many themes of her life as a young adult, notably the changing perspective of familial roles and relationships amidst her mother’s long battle with leukemia. In the title track, she writes, “I’ve fought like hell to be like the wind chime / to turn the storm into song. This is what my love for you looks like and I’d do it all again, I’d do it all again.” After releasing the record, she began split time between LA and Nashville throughout the year, cultivating her community and her work in both places.
Leena’s music is reflective of her life: it seeks to balance the ethereal and the grounded, the subtle and the deep. As an artist of many shades, she finds all her best work takes place at intersections, particularly those of creativity, curiosity, and heart.