Ninety degrees in Philadelphia on Juneteenth as Ken Jennings bids goodbye to this afternoon’s Jeopardy! contestants. In the back booth of his local dive bar, Alex G strokes his beard and gazes mistily to his left, where a second bar television is playing the same game show but with a slimy purplish-green cast to the screen. He is trying to figure out how to answer the question.
Here’s a man who once told a journalist, “I like, just started putting pepper on my food.” You would expect that was self-deprecating, or droll comedy, something Robert Pattinson might insert in conversation for the satisfaction of seeing it repeated in print. Not Alex G: These days he remains earnestly, apologetically bad at talking about himself. I’m pressing him about his hobbies and what he likes to do in his free time and it’s like watching a sitcom character try to remember their mom’s birthday. Eventually he cops to watching YouTube videos he describes as “random junk food type of shit.” He says he loves to drive. (Nothing crazy—a Jeep hybrid.) He says, “I’m very boring. I don’t do anything.”
Apart from being an indie rock star. You know, Alex Giannascoli: the 32-year-old guitarist and DIY Bandcamp icon from suburban Philly whose stature in cool rock music is such that you might forget he was also on Blonde. He says he keeps in touch with Frank Ocean, but he doesn’t like to talk about him—feels too name-droppy. Alex isn’t the type. He claims he’s never heard a song that rips his style, even though his breadth of influence is generally accepted fact. He welcomes it, though, so if you think it would be cool to rip off Alex G, go right ahead.
What you’d not guess from his early shambolic records and new-here quotes is how intently Alex G is concerned with getting things right: concerned that if he doesn’t do this interview, it might affect the success of his new album; concerned that anything he says might damage how the record is subjectively received; concerned about doing his best work. “I’ve noticed with every [new] record, I’m like, Let me do one more take to get this right,” he says. “Versus when I was a kid, I would do one take, if that, or just half a take and copy and paste, and I’d be like, It’s perfect. Everything I do is perfect. It’s just the best. Now I’m like, Oh shit, this is not good enough. I need to do it again and again.”
These days, apart from being an indie rock star, Alex G lives in northeastern Philly with the violinist and his partner of eight years, Molly Germer, their 2-year-old son, and a brindle dog named Rocco. I ask what’s his favorite place in town and he describes taking his kid to the park. I ask what he’d like to do if he weren’t an indie rock star and he says he’s thought about becoming a high school teacher. Maybe later on, down the road.
“Hopin’ I can make it through to April/On whatever’s left of all this label cash,” Alex sings on “The Real Thing,” a song from that new album, Headlights, his 10th and his first for a major label, RCA. So I ask: Yeah, he says, he made it through. He sounds a little rueful, maybe a little proud, and he declines to say how much money it was.
Of success, Alex says, “It’s always been almost like a carrot on a stick.” Opening house shows in high school, he and his bandmates dreamed of headlining them. “And then we got to that point,” he recalls, “It’s like, Oh man, what if we play [at] the bar and they pay us 200 bucks?” And so on, all the way to where he’s at now, on the same roster as pop stars like Lisa and Tate McRae.
“And we thought Modern Baseball would be the biggest band ever to play that basement,” jokes a friend who met Alex back then.
Today, though, the story of a massive rise in indie rock is also how massive it isn’t: Twenty or 30 years ago, a band like Alex G’s might’ve been called up to the big leagues on their third or fourth release. R.E.M. signed to Warner Bros. for Green, their sixth studio album. The Flaming Lips released Hit to Death in the Future Head, their fifth, on Warner in 1992 (Alex wasn’t born yet). Elliott Smith released XO, his fourth, on DreamWorks; Modest Mouse put out The Moon & Antarctica, their third, on Epic. These are acts Alex G loved growing up (well, “I honestly only started to appreciate R.E.M. more recently, but I’m sure they influenced a lot of bands that I liked”). Times have changed, though: Bands like Alex G’s don’t score hits like “Losing My Religion” or “Float On” anymore. If you’re lucky, alternative rocker is a career job.
“I’ve gotten to a place that 15-year-old me, or even 20-year-old me, would be like, Whoa, if you’re good, that’s as high up as you really want to go,” Alex reflects, while acknowledging that these aren’t exactly vertiginous heights. “But I guess it’s just maybe now I’m thinking more in terms of, I don’t know, just setting up my son for a long time or something.” For now, he feels, as he puts it, the urge to keep the ball in the air. For the people who depend on him.
Headlights is threaded with questions about how far success can really take you. “Some things I do for love/Some things I do for money/It ain’t like I don’t want it/It ain’t like I’m above it,” Alex sings on “Beam Me Up.” When I ask about the lyrics of this song, he ums and uhs for an entire 30 seconds and then comes out with this: “Basically, I got asked to do… a type of music… for a thing… that I was like, I don’t know if I am jelling with this, but I could use the money.” Pause again. “I hate to talk about it. I feel like the song is, its power is in kind of ambiguity.”
Pitchfork: In this song, how much is your perspective, or how much is the voice of a character, for example?
Alex G: I think it’s all my perspective, just the rat race and the cruelty of it all, that you can either join in or you can’t. I’m still trying to figure out what that means, I guess.
Pitchfork: Do you see yourself as having joined in?
Alex G: Sometimes, yes, and I’m not proud of it, necessarily.
He had to bail on that commission request, he says. When he sat down to write, he found he had nothing.
Better to ask Alex G about music he likes—such as why some of his earliest self-released songs continue to be his most popular, consistently garnering the highest play counts, even with half a dozen slicker-sounding albums under his belt. “My best guess is that those songs resonate with kids who are my age when I made them,” he says. “If you’re 15 or 16 now and you find something that I made when I was 15 or 16, maybe that’s resonating. And when I was that age and I liked something, I listened to it 20 times a day.”
He will also tell you how he writes songs, though it will sound like he doesn’t really know either: “I’ll get this nugget of a few chords and a melody that’s kind of attached to it,” he explains. “Usually the melody has a phonetic quality and so I’ll get a couple words from that, and then the rest of the words come pretty slowly towards the end of the recording process.” He describes it like a game of free association: The word “Louisiana” was simply a pattern he heard in the low, swampy melody of the new song by that title—no particular relationship to the geographical area. The line, “Let me write down every word/Once I was a mockingbird,” from “Afterlife,” reminds him of another mockingbird song: the classic nursery rhyme, “Hush, Little Baby.”
What did he learn from his work on the scores for Jane Schoenbrun’s acclaimed films We’re All Going to the World’s Fair and I Saw the TV Glow? First of all, he says, he got to stop thinking about himself and “just make noise with no emotional context other than what Jane would give me.” What he’d rather tell you is how he unlocked that spooky movie soundtrack swell using a built-in Logic Pro effect called Delay Designer: by staggering two Delay Designers a few measures apart and then slowly pulling up the volume on the input, escalating the signal into the echoes. He’s motioning to an invisible monitor and piano keyboard on the table between us and it makes total sense. I think he’d be a great teacher.
Let’s practice learning about an Alex G song, like the new single and title track, “Headlights.” Here is what it’s not about: The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, a phony shamanism memoir published in 1968 as a purportedly authentic anthropological document. (A spectacular grift: Author and mystery man Carlos Castaneda wrote a total of 12 of these books.) Alex first picked it up at a friend’s house as a kid, he says, then stumbled across the sequel a few years ago. He remembers one scene in the second book: “It’s him and his shaman teacher in the car and they’re driving. Then there’s headlights behind them on the highway and it’s dark and the shaman is like, Oh, how about those headlights? Those aren’t actually headlights. Those are the eyes of death and they’re always following you, and then when you don’t see them, it’s just because death turned the lights off, but they’re always there.”
Alex is saying this totally causal style: “It was like, yeah, this time it’s not a car, it’s a demon basically, or like death or something.”
But wait: What does it mean to say a song is “about” anything? Alex wrote a melody, picked up the word “headlights” in that melody, used that melody in a song, titled his new album after that song, and only later did he remember a corresponding image in an old book. Imagine if “Louisiana” were not only not about Louisiana, but also if Alex G had forgotten Louisiana exists. The headlights sorta are demon eyes, but they’re also sorta not, see? The reason Alex G pictures a bestselling fabulist and his made-up shaman flying down the highway, trailed by the deathless glow, is the same reason that “Headlights” will take you somewhere else.
“I said all this shit about the book, which I regret now. That’s not the thing,” Alex decides, taking the detour. “I’m just trying to be open when I’m writing. I’m trying to be very, very open, and that’s kind of my craft in my opinion. I’m not a great guitar player. I’m not a great structural crafter of songs.” It’s not that he isn’t thinking about what he’s singing, just not in the way you probably are. His prior album, God Save the Animals, came out only three years ago—does he remember there’s a line where he sings, “Find you sleeping with the headlights on?” No, he doesn’t. Finally he lands on this: “It’s just so hunch-based the whole time. I don’t want to sell myself short and be like, ‘It meant nothing,’ because that’s not the case either.”
Here’s how Alex G is thinking about singing, specifically about singing “Far and Wide,” a new song that will make you think, Is that Alex G singing? “I wanted it to be almost like a crooner type of song, and I just could not sing like that,” he says. “I was doing that out of frustration, that voice”—nasally, like John Darnielle’s—“but I just felt like I got to a point where I would try anything until I felt something.”
Thus “Far and Wide,” a song he’d envisioned as being a bit like Frank Sinatra’s “Over the Rainbow,” reminds him, with no irony or disappointment, of the Muppets classic “Rainbow Connection,” as sung by Kermit the Frog, and of also of “In Love,” from Alex G’s own Beach Music, a relative oddity he readily explains as “another moment where I was sort of running out of ideas.” Did I ask him why he sings about headlights again on this song? No, I didn’t.
Because there’s another thing I must know: In 2017, when Alex’s band temporarily had to stop using the name “Alex G,” why did he then switch to “(Sandy) Alex G”? This choice befuddled many of the Alex G fans I knew, so you can expect it made perfect sense to Alex, who says he’d been using the URL sandy.bandcamp.com all along and figured that people already associated it with him—that we’d see (Sandy) Alex G and think, Right, yes, Alex G who is Sandy, same guy. You aren’t supposed to pronounce the “Sandy,” by the way. That’s why he put it in parentheses.
“I remember just being like, ‘Oh, damn, people keep saying Sandy Alex G instead of just Alex G,’” chuckles Alex on our follow-up call, “which makes sense why they would say that in hindsight, but I guess I was hoping people would see it as silent.” He returned to just Alex G in 2020.
In fact the entirety of Headlights was written, played, and recorded by just Alex G, alongside regular producer Jacob Portrait (Jake or “Snake” to his friends), save for its final song, “Logan Hotel (Live),” recorded with his touring band—guitarist and keyboard player Sam Acchione, bassist John Heywood, and drummer Tom Kelly—around a piano at the downtown Philadelphia hotel. Back at his local dive, I ask, why make a track like this? “Two reasons,” says Alex, “One, selfishly, because they’re amazing musicians, and so what they’re bringing to the song, it’s special and I am trying to capture that. And then two, I want them on the album because they’re my people.”
That’s the same reason twice, and a good one, but what I say is, if “Logan Hotel (Live)” was recorded in private and assembled from multiple takes, what makes it any more “live” than the rest of the album, the songs Alex recorded solo? He looks as though he hasn’t considered this before.
Alex G: I guess ’cause we just played it all at once. It wasn’t overdubbed, you know, but outside of that, it’s basically a studio song. But I like putting “live” on shit.
Pitchfork: I feel like you might be pulling our leg a little bit. Like, you’re not lying, but it’s a little misdirected.
Alex G: [laughing] Right?
That’s Alex G—coming to you live (almost).
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Bowen Fernie
Grooming by Laramie