10/28/2024

I became very drawn to write about my associations to Alex G’s music after I saw this comment on a YouTube upload of his unreleased song “World/Insured“.

    While this comment felt so perfect and poignant, it was just one of many similar comments on the video, and on practically any YouTube/Soundcloud/whatever uploads of his discography. There are many comparisons you can make to try to describe the feeling of Alex G’s music but universally between every listener it all seems to come down to situations and memories where someone feels attune to their sense of being alive and being human.

    The phrase ‘Childlike Wonder’ has been circulating the internet for a while now. It refers to the tendency of a child to find wonder in joy in the simplicity of the world, because everything is so fresh and new to them. When we get older, the world becomes familiar and it is harder to find experiences that garner curiosity. Things discovered through childhood wonder can come back through ‘childish recollection’. Something we’ve subconsciously seen before can trigger a childhood memory.

    Sometimes, if I look at things a certain way, I can regain that childhood lens. I have to break out of the pattern of looking at things at face value, how I’ve seen them a hundred times, and focus on a new perspective. This happens to me especially with light, one of my favorite qualities about the world. If I look at a building, or a sidewalk, and see light hit it a certain way, it becomes something new and fascinating. When I shift my perspective, or remember a particularly striking memory, I get a feeling I can only describe as a glimmer.

    I think of the glimmer as something separate from nostalgia, more a type of anemoia influenced by childhood. It’s not necessarily specific memories of your own past, but a general collection of situations and ephemera that feel like experiencing the world in a simple childlike way: finding everything around you overwhelmingly beautiful.

    That ‘glimmer’ is how Alex G’s music feels. Specifically, each song evokes its own distinct anemoia that can be entirely different for each person. This could be why so many people leave those “This song feels like…” comments. It’s the reason reading those comments made me want to write this essay. The glimmer evokes our earliest perceptions, our fascination with the world and our need to comprehend it.

    But why do we get this from his music? I think it’s because his writing resembles a child’s memories. The words are uncomplicated and paint specific scenes. They have a stream of consciousness quality that feels like personal instances rather than broader concepts or ideas. For instance take his song “The Same”. I was a girl/I was the only kid in the world/I thought I knew what it meant to you/But i’m wrong, i’m wrong/I’m not okay/In fact i’m sick today, i’m on the floor/Its such a bore/Its nothing new to you. Each lyric feels like a thought, each song a diary entry. It is poetic because it resembles our own thinking. This is why so many of his lyrics, despite their simplicity, bear so much weight.

    In one of my favorite songs, “Water”, he sings “Water’s all I need, now I can go back to sleep”. It’s simple, but brings forward the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night with a parched throat, drinking a glass of water, and drifting back to sleep. This memory, so simple and universal, becomes twisted into something beautiful because the song makes you view it from your child’s lens.

    It’s particularly interesting when you look at his songs with clear adult characters. Let’s go back to “World/Insured”, the song the comment that struck my inspiration originated on. It’s a song about a husband and wife. The second verse goes: Let’s steal some marijuana from the kids/I know where they keep it hid/Let’s torch the bed and steal the gun/Let’s hold up 7/11/Let’s stop the world and shut it down/We’ll bring the whole thing to the ground/ I sure hope that it’s insured/Cause I already hear the flames roar. In the song, the characters themselves seem to yearn for childish wonder. They have grown used to every aspect of their life, and their boredom brings a need to do something extreme, because this would finally give them the long lost feeling of experiencing something for the first time.

    Beyond the lyrics, his vocal delivery and production is also a component to the feeling we get from his music. He often sings in falsetto/pitch shifts his vocals, and layers them with different vocal emphases. This results in a purposeful sound resembling a warbly teenage ballad. Much of his music has a ‘DIY’ feel because it is home recorded. The rawness of the lo-fi sound resembles the raw beauty of the world. I think a large portion of why I tend to feel more drawn to Alex G’s unreleased discography is because of this raw sound.

    It’s interesting to note that his unreleased music far outweighs the amount of official releases. The music reuploaded onto the internet feels bottomless, and every time I discover something I hadn’t had the chance to listen to before it also re-evokes my wonder. It’s typically on these uploads that you’ll find the comments detailing personal memories and experiences tied to the songs.

    My favorite line from my favorite poem “Jessica gives me a chill pill” by Angie Sijun Lu goes “I ask Jessica what drowning feels like and she says not everything feels like something else.” I’ve always felt deep affinity for this line because there are many things in this world that are so unique in feeling they cannot be described as relative to anything else. Alex G’s music feels like the opposite of this. It’s a soundtrack for everything and everyone, somehow universally molded to capture all the things we experience through a child’s eye.