Welcome to the first edition of “The Music Never Stops!” Every Wednesday, I’ll be featuring a different musician from the Storrs-Willimantic music scene, including current students, recent graduates and anyone who’s been involved in the local scene to talk about their musical journey, their experience playing shows and what inspires them as musicians. With that, let’s get to it.
What does a typical weekend night look like for a college student? Everyone has their own answer to this, from going out to bars and parties to having a relaxing evening with friends. But Lena Jones prefers to spend her nights performing in the basements of Storrs, sharing her talents with the local scene.
Jones is a 21-year-old singer and guitarist from Windham, Conn., who is one of the most recognizable voices and faces in the Storrs-Willimantic music scene over the past two years. She’s known for her expressive, jazz-influenced singing that’s both melodic and powerful, as well as the energy she brings as a frontwoman.
Jones’ musical journey began when she started playing guitar at the age of 12. She started off by playing ukelele, but upgraded from four strings to six strings when she found an acoustic guitar that her aunt left in her basement. She became fascinated with guitarists like Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin and Nancy Wilson from Heart, and it remains her favorite instrument to this today.
This was during the same time as when she started singing in the middle school choir. She said that while she didn’t enjoy sight-singing, she particularly enjoyed when the choir broke into sections and sang different harmonies, as well as suggested songs to sing. Her experience in choir and picking up the guitar were the starting points of her musical journey.
Years later, at the end of her freshman year at Eastern Connecticut State University in 2022, she formed the band Adaleve with bassist Devon Schneider. Jones’ goal was to start a female-fronted band, as there were few of those in the local music scene at the time. She said that while she has never viewed the group as a “girl band,” they’ve performed songs by female artists that hadn’t previously been heard at shows before.
“It’s not like we were just a boy band doing Weezer covers in a basement,” she said. “We were doing [songs like] Black Sheep [by Metric], we were doing iconic girl band songs even though we weren’t a girl band.”
The group started off by jamming at the Fine Arts Instructional Center at ECSU, but soon took the stage at venues in the Storrs-Willimantic area, across Connecticut and even in Massachusetts.
But no venue meant more to Jones than Funkhaus, the iconic house show venue that became the most popular basement in Storrs from fall 2022 to spring 2023. Adaleve was one of the core bands that performed regularly at the venue, making Jones one of the most recognizable faces and voices to perform there.
It was at Funkhaus where she performed one of her favorite shows, in November 2022. It was the first big show at Funkhaus and Jones recalled feeling how special the space would become right away.
“There was just an energy of a future upbringing of musicians in that room,” she said. “I could feel the encouragement and it was so cool.”
Funkhaus was one of Jones’ favorite places to play because she always felt comfortable there, especially as a female musician in a male-dominated scene.
“It was so great because I felt safe,” she said. “Being in a half-female group and being one of the only girls in the scene at the time, it felt cool to be like one of the guys.”
Jones spoke of the struggles that female musicians like herself have faced, both in Storrs and in college music scenes in general, noting that “you’re either respected or hyper-sexualized because you’re a woman with an instrument.” She said that she’s had both very positive and very negative interactions with people at shows as a result.
“It can be very hit or miss,” she said. “People can either really adore you or they can just be super creepy towards you.”
She noted that things have gotten better for women in the scene and said that “it’s inspiring to see other women in the scene more” as they follow in the path that Jones helped to build.
Jones said that her favorite part of her time with Adaleve, and of being a musician as a whole, is getting to perform live. She enjoys this more than recording music, which is something that she’s done before and wasn’t a big fan of.
“I recorded a little bit at Eastern [Connecticut State University], but I got so insecure about hearing my voice in the headphones played back that I got too scared to record again,” she said. “I just love playing live or hearing live recordings versus trying to record myself to see how I sound or trying to produce a track.”
Despite her past experiences, she said that she hopes to record original songs that she’s written soon. But most importantly, she just wants to keep doing what she loves most: playing shows and having fun making music.
“I really just want to have fun with music,” she said. “I don’t want there to be pressure to it. I just want to play what I love with my friends who I love.”