Leanna Firestone Brings a Brutal Honesty to Her Well-Crafted Songs

From a young age, indie pop singer-songwriter Leanna Firestone knew what she liked. As a child, Firestone routinely attended writing and theater camps and loved to sing.

“I was interested in [writing and singing] as very separate hobbies,” says Firestone in a recent phone interview. The indie pop singer-songwriter brings her Becoming Unbecoming Tour to Mahall’s 20 Lanes on Friday, Aug. 23.

Growing up, she enjoyed writing One Direction fan fiction, poems and short stories in her free time.

“My mom would send me to [writing camps] in the summer. Mostly to get rid of me, but also because she was like, ‘You are interested in this, and you should develop this craft more,’” says Firestone.

There was even a photo of her 8-year-old self writing a nature story, posted up against a rail at one of these writing camps, published in her hometown’s local paper.

“Everybody thought that that was really funny and very stupid for me to be doing,” says Firestone, who claims she didn’t “develop shame” until an older age, but now it consumes her.

She speaks and writes with equal parts self-deprecating humor and brutal honesty.

“I knew that I wanted to be a singer — I didn’t know I wanted to be a musician — when I was listening to ‘Our Song’ by Taylor Swift in the car with my mom,” says Firestone. “I was like, ‘Yeah, this is the best feeling in the world, singing along to this song in particular, and if I can sing to music like this and have other people sing along and feel the way that I feel right now, that is my dream and my goal.”

Firestone eventually built up enough self-confidence to move from the technical side of things into the performing world at the theater camps she was attending. So, by the time she wrote her first song in middle school, she was ready to perform it.

“As a burgeoning tween, I was like, ‘Oh, I love music and I love singing and performing music, but I also love writing so much,’ says Firestone. “And I really didn’t know what I was gonna do about that.”

So, after she had learned to play some basic guitar chords, Firestone decided to move past covers and try to parlay her rapidly evolving writing talent into songwriting. This resulted in her first ever performance of the first song she had written at her eighth grade talent show.

“I did come in second, I must say that” says Firestone. “I came in second, after two girls that performed the Ed Sheeran Hobbit song. The ‘I See Fire’ Hobbit song came out when I was in eighth grade, and it was a smash hit. It won over mine.”

It was, however, Firestone’s first step towards finding a home sharing her own songs onstage.

“I sort of launched myself in the deep end, and then, over time, I started being like, ‘Oh, I kind of like the feeling of everyone looking at me, when it’s positive,” says Firestone.

Flash forward to a college-age Firestone accidentally stumbling upon an easy choice for her debut single, and the rest is history.

Firestone was a commercial songwriting major, who still saw herself as more of a lyricist who liked to sing than an artist, until she went viral.

“Strawberry Mentos,” a sparse pop tune released in 2020, puts Firestone’s quivering voice up front. It racked up 50,000 TikTok likes, when she posted a video of herself playing an unreleased version of the song. That was the push she needed to get the ball rolling.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this is the height of fame,’ says Firestone. ‘Everyone’s gonna forget about me; I’ve got to do something.’”

Within two weeks, she had finished the song and found a friend of a friend in her college town to help her produce the sweet track about the early stages of falling for someone who is going the extra mile to be thoughtful.

“It was a very, very fast process, because I was trying to capitalize on people’s attention,” says Firestone.

The singer-songwriter proceeded to release a handful of EPs over the first few years of her career, trying to build on her momentum.

Now that she has built a loyal fanbase, she’s taking her time with each release, backed by the support of her current management.

“I know a lot of people think that I’m about to drop an album, and I’m not,” says Firestone. “I feel like, ever since I’ve been doing music, I’ve been cranking stuff out, for better or for worse, and now…I’ve settled into the luxury of being like, ‘I’m actually just gonna release singles for a second.’”

Earlier this year, Firestone booked a couple of weeks of studio time and finished seven or eight songs, from which she has been pulling this year’s single releases.

“Black Box Warning,” Firestone’s second single of 2024, is all about the anxiety-induced fears of destroying or not deserving something good.

“I, for the first 20 years of my life, never dated anyone. I had some situationships here and there, but nothing too serious,” says Firestone. “I met my current boyfriend like three years ago, and as things started to get more serious with him, the more I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’m gonna poison him with my sadness.’”

The driving line for the song, “the more of me you’ll see, the less of me you’ll like,” refers back to previous tracks on which Firestone has delved into her body image issues, such as the fan-favorite “Diet Coke.” “Black Box Warning” also explores romance.

“If I allow myself to be close to you, you’re actually gonna realize that I’ve tricked you into being in love with me,” Firestone says.

Firestone asked her boyfriend if he could produce the demo for the tune.

“Whenever he played it, I started crying, because I was like, ‘That is exactly what I heard in my head,’” says Firestone. “It’s crazy because it’s like, I’m signing this song about how I’m gonna poison you if you get to know me for real, but you have made this thing that’s exactly what I was thinking the song should be, based off of no prompt.”

And so, she realized that he had come to know her deeply without her even noticing, and he still wasn’t running away.

“I do always feel like the most recent song I’ve written is my best ever, says Firestone. “Every single time I put music out, it does feel like a step up from the previous release, and it does feel like building blocks. I mean, I do a lot of self-referencing.”

Firestone’s brand new single, “Becoming Unbecoming,” the namesake for the tour that brings her to Mahall’s, is the perfect example of incorporating this writing technique.

“[On ‘Becoming Unbecoming’] I reference like four other songs that I’ve already put out," she says. "I think that’s something that’s really exciting about my music is you can always find and pick out little parts from before, that are being really incorporated into now.’”

Since Firestone tends to dig deep with her lyrics – which can lead to some wordy verses, bridges, and choruses — many of her songs aren’t easily accessible to people who aren’t familiar with her music.

“Foreverever” is her favorite song to play live because the whole crowd gets into it.
“It’s the one that is not so wordy that by the end, people still don’t know what I’ve said.

It’s the one that like even dads start moving to, a little bit,” says Firestone. “By the end, everyone has learned the chorus, and I can’t say that about all of my songs.”

Firestone had a major panic attack the day she wrote the upbeat twenty-something girlhood anthem, but she showed up to the studio anyway.

“I ended up writing the concept for ‘Foreverever’ because I was like, ‘I think I’m going to feel younger than I am forever and less mature than I am forever, in my life. Which, I’ve been told by moms at shows, that’s not the case. That’s only for your twenties. So, I’m hoping that things will change,” says Firestone. “That song is on a project called Good Grief, which is all about my dad being addicted to drugs. I know it sounds like it doesn’t fit there, but it does in my head, because at the same time I was facing all these hard truths, I was facing all these realities about my relationship with my dad changing for the worse — forever. I was like, ‘What if I plug my ears and sing a happy song?”

Firestone dropped off a rough draft of the song with her producer and went home to get some rest, after figuring out the bassline. When she woke up from her nap, he had sent her the finished demo with a note saying he thought it was the best song they had ever worked on together.

“He was like, ‘I think this is the one. Like, this is the one to me that should be on the radio, should be in movies, should be on billboards,'" she says. "And after I listened to it, I felt exactly the same.”

Subscribe to Cleveland Scene newsletters.

Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | Or sign up for our RSS Feed