by Jane Lambert

Lenni Revel’s Intricate New Single “Annabelle” Shares a Meaningful Message

Lenni Revel lived what felt to her like a pop star fantasy; 5 Grammy submissions, her image on billboards in Times Square, A&R agents courting her. But she traded it all in to kick her prescription Adderall addiction cold turkey in a shed outside of her parent’s house. Lenni was trying to sober up from the drugs and hype of the life she was living, a life she admits she had created. The momentum of years of the lifestyle did not just change with her mind overnight. When she might have been wiser to ease herself off of drugs she chose to go at sobriety the way she’d gone after everything else—all in or nothing. The ambition for overnight clarity and sobriety backfired and she was eventually admitted to a psych ward and put on a mandatory suicide watch. Once out of the facility, she set upon continuing her path to a more genuine life. A week after her 25th birthday she thought she would slowly re-enter the world taking a day gig job by responding to a Craigslist ad to help someone pack up their garage in preparation to move. That someone was Robert Revel. He would become her husband and the musical muse to get her back into the music business with a clear soul and an indefatigable passion.

“I wish I could tell you that upon seeing Robert for the first time, the heavens opened, and our romantic story began right away. It just didn’t happen like that. I remember feeling strangely at ease on first impression with him,” Lenni says. “He effortlessly saw into who I was as a person. There may not have been the cliché ‘sparks’ between us but there was a deeper fire at the core that initially I think we both sensed. I knew I was going to marry him.”

Lenni’s new single “Annabelle” was written by Robert when he was single and dating. He shared with Lenni that he remembered sensing that the women he was seeing weren’t experiencing a certain quality of freedom that allowed them to really shine, that many were either acting out social norms, or engaged heavily in reacting against them. Robert wrote “Annabelle” about those male-imposed values pushing women to stay in a woman’s “place” and made them high-value targets with Lenni’s powerful vocals breaking the glass ceiling of every outdated feminine archetype. Lenni’s voice provides a moving and powerful sense of taking back your power and sense of self. The song’s crescendo ends in a guttural gasp from Lenni, catching her breath from underneath what feels like a millennia of suppression.

And Lenni’s voice is unique. There is such an emotional depth and sincerity, that it is almost peerless. She sings with both purpose and passion. Comparisons to Fiona Apple, Stevie Nicks or Miley Cyrus only fall short of actually hearing the raw and velvety smooth sounds in her vocal arsenal. Musically speaking, “Annabelle” has an outlaw Americana/Alt Rock sound with Joni Mitchell storytelling—a real breath of fresh air.

“When I started singing ‘Annabelle,’ I felt the themes of the song in my own life, of course,” shares Lenni. “In the final rise of the song, the roles that have been assigned to women for millennia are called out by name and by the end my voice bleeds into this guttural scream. When performing it, I feel an ancestry of pain.”

We couldn’t be more excited to have this incredible artist’s voice and message breaking on the horizon, and can’t wait for more to come.

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08.09.22

by Jane Lambert

Video Voyager: Lenni Revel’s “Where There Ain’t No Sun”

Lenni Revel’s story begins the way most fairytales end: Big A&R professionals vying for her music, Grammy nominations, and billboards in Times Square promoting her music. But her pop dream ended when she was kicking Adderall cold turkey in a shed outside of her parent’s house and plunged into such darkness that she was eventually admitted to a psych ward and put on suicide watch. Her upcoming album, Unbroken, is about her rebirth and reclamation from the clutches of mental health struggles, drugs, and the music business machine. Unbroken also embodies a profound love story between Lenni and her husband, Robert Revel, a family lawyer and critically-acclaimed author who wrote and co-wrote much of the album.

Her video for her latest outlaw country-esque and pop-rock infused single “Where There Ain’t No Sun” conceptualizes pain and loss. While Lenni’s voice is powerful on it’s own, the imagery of a cemetery really drives home the emotional aspect of the song. What really drives the video home is when Lenni releases ashes at the top of a hill at the climax of the song. It’s chilling, haunting, and mesmerizing. She’s symbolically letting go, releasing herself from the pain.

We spoke with Lenni about the music video:

Tell us the story of this song, why did you choose to visualize this song specifically in this way?

The cemetery in the video is a beautiful old site where the founders of the city are buried. It is a favorite walking path of many locals, including Robert and I. The Mausoleum is also on the cemetery site, and we were granted access by a kindly groundskeeper to shoot the interior scenes depicted in the video. The hilltop scene, where the urn ceremony occurs, is another hiking favorite locale of ours. We imagined that one day we would shoot some kind of music video on the spot because of its beauty.

What was the inspiration behind this video?

The song, “Where There Ain’t No Sun” was originally written about unrequited love. I evolved the song’s vocal melodies and facilitated structural and lyrical changes to accommodate my interpretation of the song as being fundamentally about deep loss and grief. My version brought the visual application of the music to images of death, but painted delicately and beautifully with a performance with heart and soul right at the center of it.

What was the process of making this video?

Once the cemetery location was chosen, the time of year to shoot there became an important element; we wanted to capture the beautiful lush green grasses and mosses that grow there in the spring—new life emerging from death. We shot the graveyard scenes in March and soon after we shot the mausoleum scene at the same location. Our dog “Kota” (she is a pure-bred Thai Ridgeback) was utilized in the gravestone shots as an element representing the haunting aspects of grief and the unseen but ever-watching spirit world. Kota, as a recurring element has subsequently made appearances in every music video I’ve performed in. The ceramic urn used for the ashes has special value to Robert, as it is the gift of his best friend who passed away in his fifties. The drone shots on top of the mountain were shot by a local drone pilot who typically shoots for real estate clientele. We had to shoot the ash ceremony quickly as the sun was setting and we had only a few-minute window to gather all the footage.

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