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 from 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 (playing a special showcase curated by Sonicbids) 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 Dusted Magazine‘s Ben Donnelly making comparisons with the Mountain Goats. Willfully Obscure and Music for Robots invoke similarities with Rufus Wainright, and Music. Defined 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, Dusted Magazine notes that St. Lenos is “somewhere between honest tabernacle rafter-shaking and jumbo mumble”, and Moxipop observes “he sings with a trembling vigor that may be vibrating in from other dimensions.”

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 1st Prize Winner for the Corpus Christi International Young Artist’s Competition for the Violin. At Juilliard and the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music, Choi was a student of Won Bin Yim and Dorothy DeLay, who instructed Itzhak Perlman, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sarah Chang. Choi was also the concertmaster of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra at the Interlochen Music Festival.