The recordings are not about fitting one sound. They are about getting a feeling out before the moment disappears.
John Leonard is a singer songwriter and guitarist whose work moves between written songs and recordings that happen once and are left where they landed. He is self taught, plays by ear, and has spent decades learning the instrument through instinct, repetition, and listening.
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 responded differently. One room could make the guitar feel close and intimate. Another opened into natural echo and long 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 without a predetermined tuning, progression, or song. The notes came from whatever mood he was carrying. If the night felt sad, depressed, or lonely, the guitar 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 instrument matched what he was feeling. Dark and unresolved when that was where his head was. The goal was never the theoretically correct tuning. It was finding the point where something inside him began to loosen.
The process became therapeutic. Feelings he could not articulate could come out through six strings, resonance, repetition, dissonance, silence, and the sound of the room itself. The loneliness that brought him to the guitar also became part of what the guitar helped him carry.
There was nobody in the next room, nobody to impress, and nobody whose judgment he had to anticipate. That privacy allowed him to stop holding back. Some recordings became songs. Others became long improvisations, ambient pieces, drones, or something between all of them.
They were never intended to be pieces he would reproduce exactly. They are moments in time. The person, room, tuning, hour, and emotion existed together once. The recording is simply what remains of that moment.
Singer songwriterIndieAlternativeAcousticAmbientExperimentalDroneImprovisation
