The People Issue 2025: Leah Piemonte

For Leah Piemonte, music is so much more than an art form. It is a powerful tool she uses in her day-to-day life as a form of therapy, for both herself and others.

Leah works as a music therapist at Fifty-Forward, a non-profit organization that provides adults over 50-years-old with a place to engage in fulfilling and exciting activities such as chess club, bingo, photography, music classes and much more. Through these programs, older adults are able to build a sense of community and live longer, more enhanced lives. Piemonte’s music classes are strategically curated for older adults living with memory diseases like Alzheimers, and her work touches the lives of several families all over Williamson County.

Apart from her work in music therapy, Piemonte spends a lot of time working on writing and recording music with her boyfriend, and she has released an album and several singles under her stage name, Leah Chris. Although Piemonte lived most of her life in Virginia, she moved to Williamson County in 2023 to chase her dream of writing and recording music.

Piemonte fell in love with music in high school, when she first started writing music in her bedroom freshman year. She feels most connected to music when she’s writing, and spent most of her life honing in on her craft through piano and voice lessons. She knew she wanted to pursue a career in music, but it wasn’t until she participated in an independent study with her choir teacher that she realized she wanted to lean more into music therapy.

“Our public school system had music therapists come in on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and they did sessions with students in my high school that had intellectual disabilities. I did that as an independent study, and I fell in love with it. I saw people coming in that were non-verbal, and they were able to express themselves through music,” Piemonte tells the Williamson Scene. “They would hum along, and it was eye-opening. These services were scarce, so that’s how I knew what I wanted to do.”

After graduating high school, Piemonte attended Virginia Tech on an athletic scholarship. Originally, she started her collegiate career as a swimmer first, musician second. She majored in music, but spent a lot of her time working on her swim career to uphold her scholarship. Eventually, Piemonte realized it was near impossible to balance her career as a diver and continue as a music major, so she switched her major to human development, and later went on to receive a second degree at Radford University where she studied in music therapy.

After college she worked as a music therapist in Washington, D.C. but found herself flying back and forth to Nashville to write and record with her boyfriend, an audio engineer, who moved to the area. That’s when she decided to move too.

Once she settled into her new life in Nashville, Piemonte started her work at Fifty Forward, specifically helping those with Alzheimer’s and dementia. She spends her time working with the patients she sees to reduce anxiety and depression, increase verbal fluency and even spark memories.

“I do a lot of music with them, because it’s one of the most amazing tools that you can use with patients as they’re declining and losing speech.” Piemonte says. “Rhythm and music really uses a lot of different parts of the brain, so it’s super effective.

In her music therapy classes, she leads activities such as live music karaoke with on-screen lyrics for her patients to follow, as well as music trivia, where she asks music-related questions to spark the memories of her Alzheimer patients.

“They just love it. It’s making a huge impact on them and their relationships, and also their memory recall. They’ll start talking to each other about where they were when a certain Beatles song came out, it’s remarkable,” Piemonte says. “I had a lady the other week that told us her boyfriend in high school sang the song we were listening to to her all the time, and that she thought he was good. Little things like that happen all the time, but they’re actually big things.”