“It’s a song and video that happens to be about the end of a gay interracial relationship, that doesn’t make a big deal about being gay or interracial. I think that’s an accomplishment. The song and video focus on food and love. We weren’t going for something preachy and obvious, more for simple and normalizing. This isn’t Towleroad” -Andrew Choi, St. Lenox
About St. Lenox
St. Lenox is the project of Andrew Choi. Choi’s journey away from, and back to music has been a circuitous one. In the mid ’90s, he was a Juilliard-trained violinist. He quit music to get a degree in Philosophy and went on to receive his PhD in Philosophy at The Ohio State University. In graduate school, he fell back into music by way of the art of karaoke, and went on to learn jazz and songwriting at dive bars and open-mics in Columbus, OH. A change in careers took him to New York City, where he now works as a singer-songwriter and works at a law firm in Manhattan.
Variously categorized as “folktronica”, r&b, indie-pop and jazz, St. Lenox has performed nationally, appearing at festivals such as CMJ Music Marathon and CBGB Music Festival as well as Musikfest and MidPoint Music Festival, where he was designated a “Critic’s Pick” and compared in print to Cee Lo Green and Soul Coughing in CityBeat Magazine. St. Lenox appeared on Streamed Dumplings, a limited-run streaming show put on by staff at MTV, and made a brief musical appearance on the TLC show Extreme Cheapskates.
St. Lenox’s debut album 10 Songs About Memory and Hope has received critical acclaim, with NPR’s Otis Hart and and Dusted Magazine’s Ben Donnelly making comparisons with the Mountain Goats. Willfully Obscure and Music for Robots invoke similarities with Rufus Wainright, and MusicDefined speaks of St. Lenox’s storytelling as reminiscent of a young Billy Joel. John Darnielle, of the Mountain Goats, has called St. Lenox a “lyricist of the highest order.” In reference to the vocals of St. Lenox, Dusted Magazine speaks of St. Lenox as “somewhere between honest tabernacle rafter-shaking and jumbo mumble”, and Citybeat Magazine noting similarities with Cee Lo Green, Ryan Adams and Adam Levine.
Prior to his career as a singer-songwriter, Andrew Choi was the 1st Prize Winner of the American String Teacher’s Association National Solo Competition for the Violin, and the Corpus Christi International Young Artist’s Competition. Choi was a student of Won Bin Yim and Dorothy DeLay, who instructed Itzhak Perlman, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sarah Chang. At the Interlochen Music Festival, Choi was the concertmaster of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra.
TOUR DATES:
2/21 New York, NY New York Antifolk Festival (early – 6pm)
4/03 New York, NY Cake Shop
