Lena Maude is known for her quirky presence that is both extremely playful and very serious. Her music shimmers between intimate indie folk and ambient experimental pop using intricate fingerstyle guitar, wide-ranging vocals, looping textures, and any object that makes sound.
With origins in Midwest DIY scenes, Lena draws influence from poetic songwriters, small-town life, and the dream world. Her lyrically deep songs entwine nature, myth, mystery, and the tender condition of being alive. Lena performs with abundant emotion and expressive physicality. At live shows her visual art complements the music with themes of light and dark intermingling.
In a childhood that often felt like living underwater in a kaleidoscope, Lena sought remedy through voracious reading, prolific writing, nature immersion, rampant doodling, and being silly. These habits have formed the nexus of her musical career. After being gifted her first guitar at age 15 Lena quickly taught herself how to play. Songwriting has slowly gained presence like a saguaro after many hours of contemplation.
For a 7 year cycle in the far north of the Keweenaw Peninsula Lena contended with the Self, life purpose, and ‘burnout’. Toting a large repository of unheard songs, Lena hit the road during winter of 2025 on the Change Everything You Know personal tour. She let go of nearly all her belongings and made it a mission to augment beliefs and habits. For the first time in her life, Lena is now focusing on music full time.
Listeners are invited along for the journey of exploring the deeply meaningful with a touch of big-picture humor. Originally from Michigan, Lena is currently in the Western Slope of Colorado working on new releases including a confessional folk album titled Tender.
"Engaging with her art is a process of integrating the unknown itself -- a haunting, unsupported journey toward a new relationship with what’s possible. Like déjà vu: nightmarish, necessary, and strangely productive."
-JP Harrison, Technology Wizard + Friend
Near Halloween I drove home from high school in a green Pontiac Bonneville (my dad was a used car salesman) to find a guitar on my bed. We lived in a double wide at the time on around 30 acres of farmland in Michigan. On this property there was a mature red oak I would climb into with a journal. In that tree, and of course elsewhere, I wrote and wrote and wrote. When I saw that guitar in my room I felt something change: a notion of possibility for me - not just for those characters in books. A corner of my psyche went from dull and vacant to bright.
As the youngest of a talented musical family I had let myself become relegated to the bass player for the Methodist Church's Praise Team and half-assed player of a coronet my mom found at a yard sale. But this guitar gift opened a door to creativity, it became a channel for all of my incessant journal writing, a tool for expression to begin to access who I was at the core. It's the very same guitar I gig with today. While I began writing songs almost immediately, my voice took longer to develop.
A similar ah-ha moment occurred when my mother nonchalantly gifted me a jamman looping pedal as I headed out to finish my Math degree (I had dropped out of Uni for three years). My housemate had a ukulele. I built a bougarabou with a dear mentor friend. I was writing geometry proofs into the night and hanging around the university's audio production facilities. All the ingredients came together and the song 'Last Thing You'll Say' popped out of the ether of an untapped creative frequency.
From that point in 2014, the challenge became fully opening up and presenting what I made in secret with others. I was no longer a girl who happened to write songs with her guitar. It marked the beginning of becoming someone who brings songs. Music became the place where I could open my throat, where I could allow myself to cry, where laughter could become real. A place where everything makes sense in it's senselessness. A place where the soul awakens, releases happen, and emotions stir the energetic fabric.
Along with laughter, writing saved me. Many times. From all the various things that can ail one: loneliness, sadness, grief, the "why?!"s, depression, relationship struggles, life obstacles. The endless library of possible songs has revealed to me the expanses of my own creative being and the routine of cyclic patterns. Writing has illuminated the beauties and will continue to do so. It has helped me to step more into this life experience and be more human. My hope is that the music I share may do the same for others.
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