Artist Lee Walton Shows Her Vulnerable Side With a New Multimedia Project

On June 12, a group gathered around a one-of-a-kind stereo system at the Beck Cultural Exchange Center in Knoxville, Tennessee. They’d come to the museum at the behest of Lee Walton—born Leona, but best known as Binx, the model who’s been walking runways and starring in high-fashion campaigns since she was 16 years old. But they weren’t there to take in the Tennessee native’s visage. Instead, she revealed something far more internal: her first book and its accompanying record, Landscapes of the Mind.

Walton, 29, first started writing Landscapes nearly four years ago. “It just sprouted out of an incredible desire and need for me to face myself after so many years of suppression and oppression, both societal and self-inflicted,” she tells W of the book’s genesis. Landscapes was almost a form of therapy for Walton. After years of indulging in what she calls “negative coping mechanisms,” Walton turned to the more productive outlet of writing, and the words just began to pour out. “In a weird way, the book wrote itself.”

It’s hard to describe Landscapes. It’s a look inside Walton’s brain, it’s poetry, it’s prose, it’s stream of consciousness. “It’s just what the psyche clings to during the process of love and disappointment and the transition into becoming a fully conscious being,” Walton says. “It’s experimental. I didn't really know what I was writing. I just reached into my mind and that’s what came up.”

While writing, Walton found herself listening to “Harvest Time,” the 1977 song by saxophonist Pharoah Sanders. “I started speaking over his music and fell in love with this concept,” she says. Walton decided she wanted to record parts of her book over a musical composition, and she reached out to Sanders with the hope of a collaboration. Unfortunately, she never heard back from the musician, and he passed away not long after her initial inquiry. So Walton moved on to other composers. “Nobody understood what I wanted,” she says. “[Music is] a monetary business in some respect, and I understand that, but I was just looking for a creative partner.”

Instead, she turned to an actual former partner, an ex who makes music. “We communicated through music for a large portion of our relationship when we couldn’t talk or express ourselves,” she says. Walton shared her request—that he create a piece of music about their relationship—to which he revealed he’d previously composed a song that fit that exact prompt. Three days later, he sent it over, a sultry and romantic jazz-centered work grounded by sounds of nature. “It’s a real conversation between lovers,” Walton says.

From there, Walton began recording her voice over her ex’s piece, a journey that took her to Los Angeles where she discovered the world of high-fidelity audio. The desire to reproduce the audio as authentically as possible led her to build a stereo on which she could play her record using hi-fi technology. It was on that stereo that she played Landscapes to the public of Knoxville for the first time.

Unsurprisingly, Walton dreaded the moment. Landscapes is extremely intimate, and Walton is used to hiding—behind the name Binx, under layers of luxury clothes, and in the recesses of her mind.

Binx was a childhood nickname, and when Walton’s career began when she was a teenager, she took it on as her professional persona. “I was just a kid. I said whatever I wanted to say and did what I wanted to do,” she recalls of her early days in the industry. “I had a real devil-may-care attitude, but this record is not that at all, so I’m completely wiping away what people know of me with this.” Landscapes is a much more vulnerable side to Walton, and she admits to being mortified as it played for the public. “I just kept my head down,” she says. “But, eventually, I thought, ‘Fuck it. This is really who I am. These are all my cards.’”

But the crowd at the Beck Center loved it. Walton handed out sticky notes before the performance—in case those in the audience wanted to write down their thoughts on the piece—and was shocked to find that when she finally looked up, many people were feverishly scribbling away. Walton later collected the notes and saw the results—people noting lines that stuck out to them, questions that arose, and memories the record invoked. “That meant the world to me,” Walton says.

The experience has also given Walton the confidence to continue touring the book. Now, the stereo is headed to her home in upstate New York. “My mom wants to listen to her Pat Metheny records on it.” But Walton hopes to showcase Landscapes in her current home state as well. She has also written another book she plans to publish. She will do all of this under Lee, maintaining a distinction between her two personas. “Binx is great,” she says. “Not that Lee and Binx are two different people, but I prefer to allow those two entities—and the people who are interested in each one—to exist separately.”