Christie Lenée

BY MIXING FINGERSTYLES, TWO-HAND TAPPING AND IMPROVISED PERCUSSION, CHRISTIE LENÉE HAS EXTENDED THE POTENTIAL OF THE ACOUSTIC GUITAR

Christie Lenée is the sort of player who makes you rethink your approach to the acoustic guitar. She might well make you rethink the whole instrument. Her style is percussive and kinetic, melodically adventurous, almost neoclassical, and from the outside it’s hard to know where to start, what element of Lenée’s techniques to unpick first and try to incorporate in our own playing. There are elements to her playing that call to mind maverick fingerpickers such as Tommy Emmanuel, but Lenée’s style is her own. What she doesn’t have, however, is downtime.

Lenée has just got back to her home in Florida, where she’ll have just 36 hours or so before packing a case, grabbing a guitar, and heading out on the road again. She’s just back from a guitar festival in Colombia, and is preparing for some UK dates, having only been in London in September when she won Acoustic Guitarist of the Year 2019 at the UK Guitar Show. Somehow, within this schedule, she’s got to find the time to finish preproduction on her full-length follow-up to 2016’s Stay. And that has to take priority. This period is crucial for Lenée. As she explains, this is when she rediscovers her compositions, with some of them having been written a long time ago, and refines them for the record.