“It was this song ‘Like a Stone’ by Audioslave‘ said Alex. “One night I was on the radio and was like, ‘What’s this…? This is the best thing I’ve ever heard!'”
“Blessing” isn’t the theme of the new album, but it’s an outlier sonically. Its title includes riffing on religious imagery, “God Save the Animals,” sometimes even evoking a kind of funhouse mirrored Christianity (“God is my designer”). , surreal helium-voiced Alex sings on one song: “Jesus is my lawyer”). Alex didn’t grow up in a religious household, but he admits that spirituality has been on his mind for the last few years, and that some of the songs likely came from parts of his subconscious. “I don’t have a particular belief, but it seems like a place everyone has to go to at some point,” he said.
Even if Alex’s music never felt particularly spiritual, there was a long-repeated sense of morality in it. Terrible things happen in and around the margins of his songs — nuclear bombs. Fentanyl overdose; bottomless longing—but not without renewal and continuation potential.
Similarly, one of the new album’s most poignant moments comes midway through “Runner,” which had until then been a gentle light-rocker in the vein of Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train.” “I’ve done some bad things,” Alex sings pleasantly, then repeats the line several times. It’s a cut-off in the song, but it continues just as casually.
Not to mention it doesn’t sound quite like anything he’s released before, but Alex G.’s great “me” song. It’s like, “This is going to be a cool song.”
“And it sounds like me because I don’t know what I’m doing,” he added, laughing against the wind. .”