Verified by 
“Heavy is the crown
One shot for the winner
Two more down
Go and toast to your dinner
Pedal to the floor
What’s one more”
From “Sinner” by Leilani Wolfgramm
From an early age, Leilani Wolfgramm knew something about herself – she naturally experienced very deep and dark emotions. “I’m prone to the sadness,” Wolfgramm told me. “I’m Scorpio through and through.
“I come alive in anything that’s dark for some reason.”
This self-described darkness manifested in ways that both harmed her personally but ultimately helped her artistically. Leilani Wolfgramm feels that she was born with an “addictive personality” which was marked by a strident perfectionism.
“I think when I was a kid … what was in my personality was very compulsive and very addictive. I had this thing inside of myself where I was always competing with myself and I was a super-perfectionist, to the point where I’d throw up in PE before we’d have to run … in middle school … I just had to do well,” Wolfgramm said. “It sucks. You don’t really get anything done because you’re afraid you’re not going to be perfect. It’s really hard to start projects and complete them because nothing’s good enough.
“I think maybe that part of my personality really gravitated towards drugs because it was an escape from what was going on inside of myself.”
Wolfgramm felt that her upbringing fed into her perfectionistic traits. Specifically, she felt that her parents’ interpretation of their Mormon faith was to achieve a state of perfection in all areas of life. This fed right into Wolfgramm’s approach to her life.
“I was raised Mormon and to me it was all just about perfection. You reach total enlightenment when you’re perfect – when you’re the nicest person and the most honest person and the most hardworking person. When you do everything right, you get to reach the ultimate happiness which is you get to go to the special kingdom,” Wolfgramm explained. “As a kid, the way that I took the religion – I just took it so matter-of-factly and so literally. I always felt that I was a sinner. I always felt that I wasn’t good enough and that I wasn’t doing the right things. It was more fear-based than love-based, which was a mistake. My mom has apologized. There was a lot of, ‘You better not do this or else you’re going to get in trouble. Don’t do this or else you’re a bad person. God’s watching you.’
“Even as a child I remember being seven years old and being like, ‘I’m f*cking going to hell.’”
Complicating matters was that Wolfgramm describes growing up in a tough neighborhood, which stoked her parents’ fears about her well-being. She felt that she was sheltered, whereas her brothers were granted more freedom.
“The neighborhood where I grew up was a bad neighborhood and my parents were just afraid – afraid that something would happen to me, and afraid for me. So that came on really strong,” she recalled. “I have four brothers and they were able to get on their bikes and ride around until the streetlights came on. I didn’t get to experience any of that. I wasn’t able to go sleep over at a friend’s house. I wasn’t able to go play at a friend’s house. I wasn’t able to go have a social life. I went to school – I did the extracurriculars that my family wanted me to do and sports. Then I would go to church and I would be at home. And I was allowed only to be around family members.”
Eventually, Wolfgramm rebelled. For years, she had been warned against life outside of the protection of her family and particularly about the effects of drugs. As she describes it, rebellion was less about defying her parents as much as seeing what all the fuss was about.
“I had this really strict upbringing…and so it was just an escape for me. I wanted to know what they were protecting me from. So, I’m just going to go figure it out for myself,” she explained.
Adding to the intrigue was the fact that many of the artists that Wolfgramm listened to at the time had died of drug overdoses. “I was listening to Nirvana and Sublime and things like that. These artists that I really looked up to – they were addicted to this thing. And this thing took their life,” Wolfgramm described. “And I really wanted to know what was so amazing about this thing that it took them away from the world.”
Never doing anything halfway, Wolfgramm skipped the alleged gateway drugs and went right to heroin at the age of 16. And while her experience was horrible, it was not as horrible as she was told it would be.
“When I was in high school I really just kind of dove right in. I went straight to heroin – kind of immediately. The first time that I did it, I threw up the entire night. The whole night I was just wrecked,” she said. “I remember what I was told would happen when I first tried drugs and I remember it not happening. So, I remember thinking everything was a lie now.
“Everything is just a lie.”
So rather than being frightened by her horrific experience with heroin, Wolfgramm felt emboldened. In fact, she applied the same perfectionistic attitude to her heroin use that she had towards her life. She kept using until she was good at it.
“It was just my personality, I was like, ‘I must not have done it right. I need to go back for more,’” she recalled. “‘I want to do it right so that it feels good.’
“I did it several times until it finally felt good.”
In fact, Wolfgramm became convinced that heroin use was part of a bigger picture of a high functioning life. “I graduated high school in my 11th year. I had this whole year … and I had two jobs. And I was using like every day. And I was still going to my job,” Wolfgramm said.
“And I’m like dude, I’m f*cking kicking *ss right now.”
Eventually, Wolfgramm had an experience that caused her to quit using needles to shoot heroin. “The only reason I even quit was one night I was at this crack house and I was shooting up coke all night. I don’t think we even had heroin … There was this crackhead bum guy that would go and get the sh*t for us and bring it back. At one point in the night he asked if he could borrow the needle and use it,” Wolfgramm explained. “And I was so f*cked up that I said yes. And when he went to give it back to me, my friend Tasi– who I did a lot of drugs with – she stopped him. She said, ‘No, no we’re good.’ And I was like, ‘What are you talking about? I need that.’ And she said, ‘No, we’re good.’ And she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me out. And she’s like, ‘Do you know what you just did?’ And when that happened to me I just remember walking home and holding my arm, my arm hurting really bad and just replaying it over and over in my head how I almost just shared a needle with some bum off the street.
“That was the very last time I used needles.”
Wolfgramm got clean and began living a very different type of life. She went to college and had a new group of friends who did not use drugs. But eventually, tragedy struck and her father died. Wolfgramm went back to using – and this time her addiction did not fit neatly into her life.
“When I was younger I was using it to party – when my dad died it was more to cope. I was using it to cope. And slowly things got worse and worse in my life – not showing up for jobs, spending all of my money. I remember one time I just straight up took my car into CarMax or something and just sold it that day so I could get high. That’s when it really took a turn and I saw the bad side of it happen to me,” she explained. “I kept it hidden pretty well for maybe a year and a half. I was still going to college, still had two jobs, still keeping it under cover. But then my tolerance got bigger and bigger and I needed more and more.”
It got to the point where she was no longer feeling good because of heroin, rather she was running on a never ending treadmill where her brain could not feel good on its own. “It’s creating this dopamine synthetically for you that your brain naturally produces when you see somebody you really like or you go on a roller coaster – those really happy feelings that you get naturally – it supplies that for you synthetically,” Wolfgramm explained. “So, even though it starts off as numbing, if you have a long term addiction to this opiate, you’re really depressed. And that’s why you need more and more and more … you need that dopamine … So, it’s not really numbing. I remember by the last year of my addiction, I’d cry every day. Every day I’d be miserable and wanted to kill myself.
“It felt like it was never going to end.”
Wolfgramm eventually stopped using heroin, but soon found that alcohol filled the same need that heroin once did. “Alcohol was never my drug of choice. I had all of these rules when I was on heroin – I didn’t mix it with anything. I didn’t drink on it – I didn’t do anything other than heroin. I didn’t drink for a really long time – so it wasn’t something I felt I had a problem with,” she explained. “So, when I got clean from heroin and started performing and doing gigs, part of gigging is that you get this bar tab – people give you shots. I was like, ‘That’s fine, and I’m not going to have a problem with that. I never had a problem with alcohol – I’ll just drink.’ And then the drinking became a substitute for the heroin.
“It got to the point where I was drinking a half a bottle of Crown before I could even go onstage.”
For all of the struggles she had with her darkness, music was one place where she could escape in a positive way. But because of her addiction, she was not able to initially pursue music professionally.
“I played music my whole life, but I really started going for it the last four years. I really couldn’t before that because I had a dependency on this drug and it didn’t give me a lot of options as far as being able to tour,” Wolfgramm said.
“I needed to be where my dealer was.”
And yet, difficult times made for great art. It was in her music that her darkness allowed her to thrive. “This is a conversation that me and my friends who are musicians have all the time … All the f*ckery, all the craziness that I experienced growing up … I was able to channel that into songs,” Wolfgramm explained. “You could say that artists f*cked up on heroin – that it directly related to the art they did. Some artists – pain drives them. And people who are on heroin – it’s a pain killer. They are experiencing pain, whether it’s psychological, emotional, physical – whatever it is … I’m even addicted to that pain.
“And I know that through that pain I’m able to channel and create something.”
And perhaps paradoxically, the more Wolfgramm shared her darkness, the better she was able to cope with addiction. And she has found that opening up works better for her than keeping her addiction a secret.
“I always put myself through the pain and did it in secrecy. And now I’m trying to talk about it more. And I write about it. And that actually helps a lot more. I think when I wrote ‘Sinner.’ It’s all about my d*uchebaggery,” she explained. “I had a tour where I was super f*cking wasted the whole time. And it was so embarrassing. I said the wrong sh*t to people and offended people and didn’t remember it the next day. And so I wrote this song about it where I say in the song, ‘I’m a f*cking black hole. I’m a f*cking *sshole.’ Because that’s how I felt. Singing those words on stage out loud and actually talking about it is what’s actually helped me, to where I literally can go onstage without drinking anything now. And it’s not something that I made a goal in my journal or something. I think it’s just happening organically – just this process of me being more open about what I’m going through.”
Wolfgramm is aware that in some ways, her artistic life is at risk as she continues her recovery. She may not feel as creative if she is free from her darkness.
“When I’m happy and things are going well – I’m not that inspired to write. I’m more inspired to live my life,” Wolfgramm described. “I think that’s what I’m here to do. I’m here to say what I need to say. And when I have nothing else to say I should stop talking. I’m not going to be one of those people who’s not inspired and still trying to write a record.
“I haven’t found a way to do that when I’m happy.”
But she realizes that recovery is a long process. And if at some point she feels that she is free from her darkness, then she is willing to let her art suffer.
“I’m better now, but I’d say I’m still working it out. I’d say I’m still an addict. I’m still struggling. I’m still grinding trying to figure out how to make it. I think I have plenty of things to be sad about without drinking alcohol,” Wolfgramm said. “I think I’m the kind of person – I write selfishly – I write therapeutically. I write for myself. And it’s going to be a beautiful thing, but also a sad thing… once I’ve said everything I have to say and worked stuff out and found happiness and success in some way. I think my work is going to suffer.
“But I think my life is going to be better.”
