Lenny Zenith is a New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA) alum whose earliest performances — at Jimmy's, Jed's, the Dream Palace, and alongside acts like U2, Iggy Pop, and The Meters — helped shape the city's post-punk scene of the early 1980s. Fronting the band RZA, he played the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival for the first of what would eventually be ten appearances, and in 1982 opened for U2 on a Mississippi riverboat, a night he later recounted for The Advocate in an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir, Before I Was Me.
Zenith transitioned in junior high in the 1970s, decades before mainstream culture had much language for it, and OUT Magazine has credited him as one of rock's first openly transgender performers. He eventually relocated to New York, fronting the acclaimed noise-pop band Jenifer Convertible through the 1990s — the band worked with a pre-LCD Soundsystem James Murphy on several tracks — and later the group Tenterhooks, without ever fully cutting ties to New Orleans.
Zenith's solo career took shape with 2018's What If The Sun, which drew glowing notices from Billboard and Atwood Magazine, with a portion of proceeds benefiting transgender organizations. In 2020 he reunited with his former New Orleans bandmates in Pop Combo for Blue Velvet Traces, recorded at the city's Blue Velvet Studios, and in 2023 released the tribute single “Always in My Heart (New Orleans Is My Home),” produced by Tom Stern and featuring John Magnie, Holley Bendtsen, Paul Clement, Amasa Miller, Michael Skinkus, Steven Fisher, and Alison Young — a truly homegrown recording, start to finish — with proceeds supporting the New Orleans Musicians Clinic.
His second solo album, He|Hymn, arrived in October 2024, produced by longtime collaborator James Pertusi and mastered by Grammy winner Emerson Mancini (Jon Batiste, Kendrick Lamar, Lizzo). Assembled remotely during the pandemic with contributions from musicians in Little Rock, Los Angeles, Austin, New York, and New Orleans — including Leonard Cohen's longtime drummer Rafael Gayol and Woodenhead's Jimmy Robinson — the record carries the sound of a hometown he never really left. Zenith's return to New Orleans became permanent in the years that followed, and in 2025 he and his band played packed rooms at Tipitina's, Jimmy's, and BJ's Lounge.
