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Every school has a resident music nerd, the kid who’s always wearing band shirts and toting musician biographies. At her school in Melbourne, Australia, Alex Lahey was that kid. “I remember reading Scar Tissue when I was way too young, and that’s like, a really good foray into the world of music writing, and biographies, and that sort of thing,” she recalled.
For Lahey, learning intimate details about Anthony Kiedis’ heroin habit in the ’80s and ’90s amounted to research for a future career. From the time she was 14, Lahey took a serious approach to learning about the craft of songwriting and the history behind it, spending her spare time poring over books and documentaries about music, first as an obsessive fan and then as a burgeoning artist. A decade later, the 24-year-old singer-songwriter’s single-minded focus has scarcely changed, which is evident on her sharp new album, I Love You Like A Brother, one of 2017’s best debuts. “I remember having a bit of a freakout the other week,” she said. “I was like, ‘I don’t have any hobbies outside of music or that aren’t somewhat music related.’ I really love it all, and I love learning about it, and I love learning about the stories behind it and the people behind it.”
On I Love You Like A Brother, Lahey spins yarns about that awkward time of life when you’re no longer a child and not quite a full-fledged adult, packing keen observations about family, relationships, and post-adolescent self-doubt inside bouncy bubblegum pop-punk songs. Lahey’s perspective is young but her level of skill as a songwriter is already formidable — she manages to sound both conversational and like an old pro, packaging her wry voice inside expertly executed pop tunes. The result is an album that is endlessly playable and catchy without ever being glib. Even when Lahey works in ear-candy mode, her words cut deep.
I Love You Like A Brother portends great things for Lahey, but she remains zeroed in on getting better at her job. “I know that I’m not the most talented musician out there. In fact, I’m very, very far from it,” she insisted. “I know that songwriting is a craft that you need to work on for a lifetime, and I really feel that the only reason why I am able to go to airport and write down “Musician” in the occupation part of the immigration card is because I just worked really, really hard.”
Naturally, given her background and pronounced Aussie accent, Lahey has already been compared with fellow Melbourne native Courtney Barnett, which she finds both flattering and kind of annoying. (“I think she’s awesome,” she said, “But comparing musicians in general kind of gets a bit boring, to be honest.”) For now, she’s looking ahead to the stateside tour in support of I Love You Like A Brother, which comes after her first foray into America this past spring around the time of South By Southwest.
What were your early impressions of the US?
I actually think that American crowds are more engaged, and there’s almost more of an intensity to them. Because Australia’s such a young country — I know that America is relatively young as well, but Australia’s a very, very, very young country. I guess it’s still developing a tradition when it comes to music. It’s like, you guys really take your music seriously. It’s great!
“Every Day’s The Weekend” is one of my favorite singles of the year. It sounds really infectious whenever it’s on the radio, and yet there’s also a real feeling of melancholy when you listen to the words. That happy-sad style of songwriting recurs throughout I Love You Like A Brother. Who influenced you to write like that?
I guess Springsteen does it quite a bit. Even a song like “Glory Days” is kind of depressing when you think about the story that he’s telling, [but] it’s got the whole baseball-y, ‘let’s go out to the ballgame’ kind of music going on, which is really lighthearted. Then when you actually listen to the story, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, he’s talking about some dude who’s obviously seriously depressed and whose life went totally downhill after being so young.’ So maybe just stuff like that. I like thinking about that sort of stuff, but I don’t know if I’m necessarily influenced by someone doing it. But, conceptually, I find it really interesting.
I’m curious: You’re a Bruce Springsteen fan, and you’ve studied saxophone, and yet there is no saxophone on your records.
There’s a little bit. “Backpack” has some saxophone on it, and on the last record (the 2016 EP B-Grade University) there was a bit of textural stuff on “Leave Me Alone.” But, yeah, I don’t really whip out the whole Clarence Clemons screamer solos or anything like that. I feel like there’s a place reserved in time for that, maybe. Although I know that Jack Antonoff does it a lot in Bleachers. Also, I play alto saxophone, which I don’t feel like is the rock and roll sax.
You’ve also mentioned Dolly Parton as an influence. What do you like about Dolly?
I just like how she doesn’t give a f–k, basically. I love brave songwriting — that’s what I aspire to myself as a songwriter. Look at Dolly Parton from the era that she came up in, and the fact that she’s a woman, and she doesn’t pretend to be anything different, or play herself down, or play down her sexuality or her femininity. It’s pretty fearless stuff. In Australia we don’t really have much of a country music scene, so when I talk about Dolly Parton people don’t really understand.
How did you discover her?
I was watching this documentary about Nashville, and it was talking about publishing and songwriting, which is something that I’m very interested in. They were talking to her about her publishing and how she wrote “I Will Always Love You.” I don’t know if you know this, but years ago Elvis wanted to cut it and the Colonel (Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager) approached Dolly Parton. [He] was like, “Elvis wants to cut ‘I Will Always Love You,'” and you know, if Elvis wants to cut your song, it’s like the biggest thing in the world. And then the Colonel goes, “But Elvis owns every song that he sings,” so basically you have to give him the publishing because he needs full skin in the game. She said no. In this interview she’s like, “I said no to Elvis and it broke my heart, but then Whitney (Houston) played it and it was kind of fine.”
I remember hearing that and I was like, ‘Whoa, she’s, like, serious business,’ and I went back and listened to all the hits, and really got into researching her. And I’ve been pretty fascinated by her ever since.
How old were you when you wrote your first song?
About 14.
What was it called?
It was called “If I Fall,” and I think it went for way too long. It was like, a long time for a couple of chords.
What inspired that song?
I think that was 2006. I don’t know if it was just me or if it was the world, but I feel like the singer-songwriter thing was very much back, and I got caught up in that. There’s an artist in Australia called Missy Higgins, and she was really, really, really big at that time. She plays guitar, she plays piano, she sings, she writes her own songs, and she sings in a very blatant Australian accent, which is very unusual. I remember being like, ‘Whoa, you can do that? You can sing the way you talk? That’s awesome.’
I was writing a lot for a couple of years after that, but then between about 16 and 18 I just stopped. A couple of things happened in my life that were pretty significant, one of which was my parents divorcing. When something really, really significant happens in my life, it takes me quite a while to write about it. I can’t write about it as it happens. I need a bit of distance and hindsight to tackle it. That’s obviously more about my personality than me as an artist.
If you look at a song like “I Love You Like A Brother,” that kind of deals with that time in my life, where my family was going through a massive shift and it kind of shifted the nature of my relationship with my brother. It’s only in the last two or three years that we’ve come back from that. That’s almost 10 years ago now that that all happened.
Many songs on this album, like “Awkward Exchange” and “Taking Care,” seem to address dysfunctional romantic relationships.
There’s no such thing as a ‘functional relationship,’ you know what I mean? All those songs that you mentioned, they are all written about the same relationship, and that relationship was very short, it was very shallow, and it was very fleeting, and I wrote heaps of songs about it really quickly, so I think that’s actually a testament to maybe how not cut-up about it I actually was.
But I learned a lot from the experience, and I learned a lot from that person and the way the whole thing started and ended. The reason why there are so many songs about it, because it was sort of this whirlwind of everything that happened that wasn’t particularly emotional within the relationship, but the emotions that I felt within myself were quite high, and I learned a lot about myself in the process.
A lot of musicians have told me that the “songwriter” part of their brains is always working. So whenever something funny, sad, or interesting happens in their lives, they take mental notes and put it into their art. Is that true for you?
Yeah. Totally. All the time. I’ll receive a text message from a friend and be like, ‘That’s a good line,’ you know? Sometimes things look good in writing and it makes you pick up on it differently than if you heard it verbally. But yeah, just having conversations with people you pick up lines all the time. I’m a very social person, and I find myself really drawing on those experiences in particular for my songwriting. I guess there’s always room in the bank for more content.
I Love You Like A Brother is out this Friday, 10/6 via Dead Oceans. Get it here.
