After Alex Amen’s refreshing set Sunday morning at ACL, The Daily Texan sat down with the eclectic rising star for a chat about his performance and upcoming albums recorded last month.
The Daily Texan: Being a native Texan, what does it mean to you to be playing at ACL?
Alex Amen: ACL for me growing up was always the festival that everybody wanted to go to in Texas … It always represented something cool, so to play, it’s definitely a bucket list thing.
DT: You have such an interesting background, you spent time living on a commune and on an island in the Puget Sound –– how have those experiences translated into your music?
AA: I think everything translates into music. To me, songwriting is moreso just living. … It’s a way that I process life, so those experiences inform the songs, just like any other experience. … The big thing that came out of the commune was my first band, that’s musically probably the biggest. … And then in Washington, I lived very isolated, so I spent a lot of time in silence and thought a lot and practiced a lot.
DT: You mentioned during the performance that you’ve been in the studio, can you tell me more about that process?
AA: There was this studio that reopened in LA that had been closed since 1975 or so. … It was basically a time capsule. In 2015, it reopened (with) all original gear, all original wiring and still had shag carpet on the walls. Nowadays, everyone’s kind of realized that old music sounds so good because of the old analog gear, and that it’s basically impossible to remake it because the way that recording technology is gone. … We did two albums there because we have a lot of songs. … It’s a lot of old gear, and you have to be patient with it. It’s like an old car. If it doesn’t start, you have to go out and whisper to it.
DT: Who would you say are some of your musical influences?
AA: Ones that people will always say would be John Denver or Neil Young. And those are definitely huge influences for me, but there’s also others, like Nirvana was huge when I was in high school for me musically. …Music is kind of like a tree. A lot of the nutrients are down in the roots, and you’ve got to dig for it. There’s a lot of fruit that people can get distracted by. Sometimes the fruit is good, (but) sometimes the fruit is rotten.
DT: Now that you’ve finished recording two new albums, when can listeners expect to hear them?
AA: I think we’ll have singles coming out in the spring next year, and then a full album, hopefully, late spring, tour in the summer, hopefully get the next (album) out in the fall. That’s what I’d like to do.
