Alex Winston finds her voice, literally and figuratively
Michigan-bred, New York-based alt-pop chanteuse Alex Winston still remembers the exact moment last year when her sophomore album, This Ain’t Luck, coalesced. Following her brilliant, but criminally overlooked 2013 debut, King Con, she had endured two tumultuous years of setbacks, including writer’s block, a romantic breakup, crippling bouts of depression, and nearly losing her operatically trained singing voice. (“I was practicing for a show and I hemorrhaged my vocal cords,” she says. “All of a sudden, I started squealing, and I literally had no control over what was coming out of my mouth. I wasn’t just startled—I was scared shitless.”) She was trying to compose one of her typically dark story-songs when enlightenment occurred.
“My first record was completely fictional and all about characters, because I’d never been super comfortable writing about myself,” says the 28-year-old Winston. But as she attempted to encapsulate the tragedy of the Jonestown Massacre, based on a photograph she’d seen of a family that died, frozen in each other’s arms, she hit her final brick wall. “Trying to write from their perspective was a crazy thing to do—it felt forced and insincere,” she says. “And my co-writer friend said, ‘You are totally doing yourself a disservice. You are miserable right now, so you need to write this song for yourself.’ It took five days, but inch by inch, my song ‘Down Low’ slowly came together.”
The finger-popping, brutally blunt processional details the end of Winston’s last relationship, and the self-respect she lost in the painful process, as do “Cruel,” “Breakdown” and “We Got Nothing” (she’s been celibate ever since, she swears—Luck is what sustains her now). “I’d never found my life to be that fascinating before,” she says. “So, it was very therapeutic, when I finally decided to stop worrying and just write about the things that were happening to me.”
—Tom Lanham
