Lenni Revel’s style encompasses outlaw country and anthemic pop-rock and her voice is dynamic and expressive, earning comparisons to Stevie Nicks, Fiona Apple, Miley Cyrus, Norah Jones, and Lana Del Ray. She and husband Robert Revel worked collaboratively on Lenni’s upcoming 8 track LP, Unbroken, which represents a rebirth and a reclamation from the clutches of mental health struggles, drugs, and the grinding machinery of the music business.
Lenni has had some experience in the music industry. Before meeting Robert, her life was a saturated pop star fantasy blur—with fancy LA A&R execs vying to work with her; a digital billboard in Times Square promoting her single and an indie publishing deal for her pop song “I Like It.” But for Lenni, something inside was beginning to move in contradiction to a conjured glamorous life. “Nothing felt clean or true,” Lenni says. She knew deep down she wasn’t an accomplished singer. By her own admission, her tone was harsh, she was pitchy, she had a narrow range and relied heavily on auto tune.
But she started experimenting with her naked voice and found on one particular occasion that “I was holding a long note and the position of my consciousness suddenly shifted.” She was no longer thinking about singing, she was just singing. In that moment, “I felt a new kind of freedom.”
Lenni just released her second single, “Annabelle” a dark alternative rock song with an outlaw country twist. It surrounds the story of a girl lost in her head, numb to the world, and barely staying afloat with her looks and charm. Lenni’s vocals swing into overdrive as the song’s dramatic arrangement sways and swells until climaxing theatrically, finally crashing into an uneasy ending with a haunting vocal delivery.
It was originally written by Robert in his single and dating days when he noticed what he describes as experiencing a consistent pain body in many of the women that he spent time with. “There seemed to be something preventing them from realizing a relative degree of freedom, beauty and love from really manifesting in their lives,” he says.
“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.”
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“Annabelle” is a song, in a sense, born of both a man and a woman, with each artist declaring the need for evolution in the ways that we see and receive the feminine. Robert’s original writing and Lenni’s development of the song through her vocal performance, become a combined force for relevant change that the husband and wife duo could feel during the development of the album; as if the song was animating itself.
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