Alex Johnston is an Everett-based folktronica singer-songwriter.
Seattle Refined: How long have you been writing/performing?
Johnston: I have been recording and releasing music since graduating college in 2015. My first EPs were released in 2016 and recorded at home. It feels like lifetimes ago because I’ve changed so much personally and have released seven albums, four ambient collections, a handful of singles and even a Christmas album. It’s interesting to have so much music out in the world as a live journal documenting my personal growth and art journey. Noah Gunderson is a Seattle artist where you can see that journey transparently taking place, and I love that evolution of a person paired with their art. With the way life was, I performed mostly around Everett, but recently, I have been enjoying connecting more with the Seattle music community. Live performances recently have included playing masked, shedding layers of my outfit, alternating between playing guitar, my keyboard, working synth loops, painting while singing and walking off stage and leaving the venue during my last song.
Tell us about the artistic process and the different stages that work into it.
I have been very motivated by concepts and whatever chapter I am living through in my life. To explore my mind-scape there’s an ever-growing lyric note on my phone capturing phrases. Ordinary phrases in conversation become lyrics, or a random melodic line that I sing to myself on a walk becomes a potential song or a scene I imagine that enchants me. All become concepts I explore. These momentary phrases could become full poems or half songs that eventually become part of my work. While I like concepts, I also love the abstract and the blurry relatability of it. The fusion of concept and abstract, synthesized and organic sounds, and lyrical and melodic references to older work bring a lot of serendipitous surprises to my process regarding how sound, melody, and word become whatever song I write. That’s what I love about my process, and I also think that’s what makes my music stand out and have a dreamy vibe.
Where does your inspiration come from? What artists have influenced you?
I love surrealism, Impressionism, abstract and mind-bending art. I’ve been really obsessed with time travel concepts lately. My latest project, “Daylight Fooldream” was inspired by sitting in a bar, a little dissatisfied with my life, looking out the window, thinking some passerby is probably looking in here wishing they could be in the bar, making me realize that I am wishing I was someone else somewhere else while someone is very well thinking the same thing of me. We’re already living in someone else’s daydream.
I took that idea and applied it inward, wondering about if my entire life already exists alongside any other potential life I could imagine for myself and what if I could jump between them, accessing any potential future you could imagine. This strange thought experiment transformed into the album and then into a 37 minute visual album film of ten music videos telling one story where I captured two realities of one person being guided from confusion to clarity and to each other with the help of their imagination. My partner Mikaela helped me bring this to life by running around Everett and Seattle, filming me, discussing vision, and even starring in it with me, and I literally could not have done it without her!
Folks who have seen this film have laughed, cried and have related to deeply personal aspects of their own life and that honestly is such a gift to have made something that hits hard like that. I almost didn’t make this because it seemed too abstract and cerebral, but I am so glad I did because it helped me process my own life. There’s always some spiritual aspect, something deeper than knowing or feeling, to simply experience something you’ll never experience again in your own way is why I make the music I do.
Thom York’s “Anima,” The National’s “I Am Easy To Find,” Beyoncé’s “Lemonade,” Pink Floyd’s “The Wall,” The 1975, Sigur Ros, Coldplay, Bon Iver’s “22 A Million” and more have been very inspiring to me!
What kind of genre is your music? What kinds of things do you write about?
A friend once described my music as sounding like Bon Iver and Coldplay had a lovechild, and I personally love that. Someone told me they avoided my music for some time because it made them feel too much and I also like that for the intentionality of listening. There’s an emotional and spiritual side to my music that has led me to say my genre is celestial folktronica.
I write a lot about breaking out of confinement, human connectedness and immersion in the beauty of the things you can’t quite describe. I like looking at everyday life with a magical filter that makes me question the reality I experience. I like flipping ideas on their heads and twisting them inside out so things have multiple dimensions. I like to zoom in on things so the microscopic seems to have cosmic proportions and zoom out to points where the universe seems comically small. I try to write about things without writing about them specifically so that it can be taken in countless different ways. I grew up in a religious environment where there were strictly enforced rights and wrongs so I love for my art to be a place where multi-truths dance, it is transformatively liberating and healing for me.
Do you have one song that means more to you or is extremely special to you?
There are a couple that are connected, so this answer isn’t a singular song. My song “Dizzy” was a song about burnout and was initially a slow song, but as I sat with it, it turned into a dance-y song that I made my first music video of. I filmed myself dancing on a roof for 40 minutes in six different outfits and edited it to be all glitchy and flowy and fun. This same setting and these outfits were eventually used in “Daylight Fooldream,” showing a continuity in my little universe, and there is even a bit where the imaginary character is watching the “Dizzy” music video in my song “Made You Look.”
The music video of “Back and Forth” encapsulates this overall concept in this dance between me and a masked version of myself (played by my partner Mikaela) that could represent a core part of your identity. At the end, following a moment of catharsis, I take the mask for myself and say goodbye to my core in a rite of passage sort of ritual that honestly has a lot of potential meaning for moving on or beginning new chapters that feel really deep for me. This is practically expressed in the video for “I’m Fine,” which captures this simultaneous reality of highs and lows happening all at once. This video transforms insincerely saying “I’m Fine” to accepting the beautiful life around you in communities where love is present. Life is overwhelmingly colorful in all sorts of intensities, and these videos capture that specialness which I try to convey often.
What experiences in your life have shaped your music?
There are so many things but what I often come back to is when my former professor, now friend Lacey Brown (who is another amazing Seattle musician) was mixing my first EPs. I expressed doubts about whether or not I should release them because my thoughts had changed about them. She told me to just release it and make the next one better and the next one better and make as much as I could. This has shaped my attitude with songwriting and music production. Life circumstances and personal stuff led me towards home producing and I wasn’t really in a place to be booking lots of shows and was overwhelmed by it, so I would release music and then work on the next project. In a span of eight years, I have released a lot of music that I have made because I’ve been making it as an evolving experiment in my home where the last project informs the next. This attitude of “make as much art as you can,” while it can turn into a productivity game, at its heart it is defiantly playful. The fact that only you can make the art that you can make is a never-ending fountain of motivated inspiration.
If we want to hear more of your work, where should we go to find it? What about upcoming shows (virtual or in-person)?
Any streaming service you use! Throw it on a playlist of similar music helps the algorithms find me, but if you want to financially support, I would encourage you to buy from my Bandcamp! Also, share with your friends or local stations!
On my YouTube channel, you can watch the entirety of my 37-minute visual album film “Daylight Fooldream.” I am very proud to have produced this story and would love for so many people to see it! If you watch it, I would love to see how it resonates with you, and you can message me on Instagram! I am excited to be playing the opening night of Everett’s Fisherman’s Village Music Festival on May 16 at 7:45 at the Zamarama Gallery.
What is next for you? Anything you’re working on right now that you’re really excited about?
No films are in the process of being made, but the ideas are certainly roaming about my mind, and I want to make sure things feel right for that. However, I have an album’s worth of material I am well in the process of producing, which feels like a continuation of the “Daylight Fooldream” style. I am already thinking ahead beyond that and want to do a pretty major stylistic shift that has been born from the minimalism of building a drum loop, coming up with a chord progression on my layered synth and improvising falsetto vocals. There is no concept but what happens from following my intuition in the moment.
Lastly, how do you take your coffee? We ask everyone!
No cream or sugar, and all black! I love Ethiopian Yirgacheffe as a nice pour over from Narrative cafe in Everett. They also have an espresso drink with Orange juice that is unforgettably amazing!
About ‘Artist of the Week’: This city is packed with artists we love to feature weekly on Seattle Refined! If you have a local artist in mind that you would like to see featured, let us know at hello@seattlerefined.com. And if you’re wondering just what constitutes art, that’s the beauty of it; it’s up to you! See all of our past Artists of the Week in our dedicated section.
