Lennon Stella has found a novel use for her free will: a theater full of strangers watching her all-time favorite film. “Using my free will!!!” she wrote in a Tuesday post announcing an Los Angeles screening, promising “‘Sleeping Lion’ surprises” alongside the movie and putting tickets on sale immediately.
The movie night is the latest piece of a rollout six years in the making. Sleeping Lion, Stella’s second studio album and her first since 2020’s Three. Two. One., arrives Oct. 23 via RECORDS — a gap long enough that plenty of fans had assumed the 27-year-old Canadian singer had quietly left music behind.
She hadn’t. She was waiting for the pressure to lift. “I waited long enough that people within the industry stopped caring, and the pressure went away,” Stella said when the album was announced. “With that came freedom, inspiration, and excitement; My true love of music returned.” Elsewhere she has framed the record simply as “a return to myself in many ways.”
Six years, one scrapped record and a producer named Andy Shauf
Getting there took work. Stella scrapped an earlier version of the album before landing on a collaboration with fellow Canadian songwriter Andy Shauf, who produced the finished record. Longtime co-writer Simon Wilcox pushed her to write without a filter and worry about reactions later.
The singles have followed steadily: “Unforgivable Things” landed Aug. 27 with a video Stella co-directed with Adam Alonzo, and “Comedy Show” followed as the second offering, a song she has described as “really personal and pretty painful” — and deliberately unfiltered.
The screening sits alongside a dense fall schedule. Stella’s Up Close & Personal run plays Nashville’s Blue Room on Oct. 24, New York’s LPR on Oct. 27 and Toronto’s Paradise Theatre on Oct. 29, closing at Los Angeles’ Pico Union Project on Nov. 3 — the first time the new songs get played live in stripped-down form.
What film she has chosen, and where she’ll screen it, went unmentioned in the post; the ticket link carries the rest. Free will, it turns out, looks a lot like a rented room and a room full of people who already know the words. Sleeping Lion is out Oct. 23.
