Teen Mom’s Amber Portwood and Daughter Leah’s Ups and Downs Through the Years
Prior to taking an Instagram hiatus, Portwood celebrated her daughter’s 11th birthday, writing, “What an absolute beautiful day with family and this beautiful Birthday girl!!”Courtesy of Amber Portwood/Instagram
Amber Portwood’s fraught relationship with daughter Leah has been documented on Teen Mom over the years.
Portwood gave birth to her baby girl in 2008 with then-boyfriend Gary Shirley. The former couple split three years later, with Shirley going on to wed Kristina Anderson, with whom he shares daughter Emilee.
As for Portwood, the MTV personality is also the mother of son James with Andrew Glennon, whom she lost custody of in 2022 following a three-year court battle over a 2019 domestic violence incident.
Her relationship with Leah, meanwhile, has been strained over the years due to Portwood’s substance abuse issues, mental health problems and previous prison time.
“I feel like I’m never going to win,” Portwood said during a September 2021 episode of the MTV show, claiming that her daughter was “acting weird” and had “turned” on her. “I wanted us to have a great coparenting family that I thought we had until it became weird.”
Portwood added at the time: “This is not [Leah]. She does not ignore me like this. Even if I take responsibility for every single wrongdoing I’ve ever done, it just feels like it’s never enough.”
“I love Strats, I’m such a Strat girl, and Fender actually recently did the 70th-anniversary Strat. And so this is one of the models that they made,” Lindsay Ell says, as she picks up her iridescent purple Ultra Stratocaster guitar and holds it up for me to see.
“It picks up the light, so it depends on where you’re looking,” she continues. “It can [appear] turquoise or even yellow or pink or whatever, but it’s really purple.” Just like her long, purple hair that cascades over her shoulders. “I have way too many guitars, obviously. It’s sincerely a problem. But yeah, she’s my fave right now. I just keep going to her and I’ve been writing a lot on her.”
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Ell is calling from her Nashville home, where she’s been living for the past 15 years. Originally from Calgary, the largest city in the Canadian province of Alberta, she started playing classical piano when she was 6 years old. But when her father showed her how to play “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar two years later, she made the switch.
“My dad played a lot of bluegrass, like went to bluegrass camps around town,” she tells me. “And so I would just follow him, and I would be hanging out with my dad and all of his friends just playing fiddle, flat picking tunes till 3 in the morning.”
Ell began listening to Tommy Emmanuel and Bob Evans and by the time she was 13, she started working with Randy Bachman of the Guess Who and Bachman-Turner Overdrive. “He would sit in the studio and play all of these crazy jazz chords up and down the neck. And I’d just sit there as my 13-year-old self and be like, ‘Randy, what are those?’ He learned to play guitar from a jazz guitarist, Lenny Breau. And so a lot of his songwriting and chords that he uses are very influenced by jazz.”
Breau also introduced Ell to Jimi Hendrix, Stevie Ray Vaughn, and Eric Clapton, which fed her need to learn as many guitar styles as possible.
When she turned 16, Ell saved up and bought a 15-passenger van, which she drove to high school during the week and then to gigs up to eight hours away with her band on the weekends, where she honed her stage performance skills.
“I think it’s why playing live is one of my favorite things to do because it’s where I feel the most at home,” she says. “I’ve been doing it ever since I was 10 years old. I would play at anything if they would have me; I would play for free wherever I could. And when I started making a little bit of money, I would just scrape together pennies and pay for a gas tank and then carry on.”
As a teenager, Ell opened for Chris Isaak and toured with Buddy Guy, who invited her to play at his Legends club in Chicago. “I remember the first time I did that, I wasn’t 18 yet,” she says. “And so I was just this tiny little blonde girl in this blues club. And I sat in this chained-off section of the club because I was so underage. Buddy used to do a residency there every January. And so he invited me up and he was like, ‘This is Lindsay Ell and she’s going to play some blues with me.’ And I didn’t even know what we would play. He would just be like, ‘Honey, we’re in G. And I’d be like, okay, here we go.’”
