John Leonard

Much of the music that became Finding My Frequency began during the dead of winter in Michigan in 2026. Leonard was there doing work on a completely empty home built in the 1960s, as well as another property for close family friends.

The house had old wooden floors, bare rooms, an empty basement, and an empty garage. With no furniture, rugs, or people absorbing the sound, every room answered the guitar differently. One could feel close and dry. Another opened into long natural resonance. The basement had its own voice. The garage had another.

Night after night, often from the middle of the night until dawn, he would pick up the guitar with no fixed tuning, progression, or song in mind. The notes came from whatever mood he was carrying. If the night felt sad, depressed, or lonely, the instrument was going to sound that way too.

He would begin with the low E string and work upward, changing one string at a time by ear until the frequencies coming back from the guitar matched what he was feeling. Dark and unresolved when that was where his head was. He was not looking for the correct tuning. He was listening for the point where something inside him began to loosen.

The guitar became a way to say what he could not articulate. The loneliness that brought him to it also became part of what it helped him carry.

There was nobody in the next room, nobody to impress, and nobody whose judgment he had to anticipate. That privacy changed everything. He could stop holding back and let the room, the tuning, and the emotion decide what happened next.

These recordings are less like songs to recreate and more like moments in time. The person, room, hour, tuning, and feeling existed together once. The recording is what remains.