Alex: You mentioned being dropped by Columbia Records, how was that time for you? It must make you reassess things.
Alec: I do good as the underdog, so in hindsight it was a really good thing. But getting dropped was like… I don’t know, it didn’t make me want to stop making music but I was definitely kind of ashamed of myself. I try to take personal responsibility for everything because if I don’t, that means there’s nothing I can do to change something. I always believe that if you try hard and do your best, something good will happen. I think there was a multitude of reasons why my first deal didn’t work, but a lot of that was just me not understanding how much work it would take for me to get it off the ground, and also I probably wasn’t mature enough at that point.

Alex: Did you doubt yourself during that period?
Alec: I didn’t actually release any music during that time so I never doubted the music, and I released what I’d written later anyway. That music is what built me my fanbase, so they responded to it really positively which helped me. I had doubts, but that didn’t make me change my style at all because I’d rather fail doing something I was proud of, than succeed doing something I don’t believe in.

Alex: Sure, it’s about having that integrity. You describe yourself as a narrator rather than a songwriter, what made you chose that title?
Alec: The singer-songwriter thing got a little bit played out I think, and some people maybe think it’s a bit lame now, even though I don’t. I feel like there was a generation of singer-songwriters I was really inspired by, like James Blunt, John Mayer and Jason Mraz, but the next wave kind of… people started to associate the singer-songwriter title with a dude in a fedora playing guitar on the beach, you know? I don’t want that to be the first image people see in their head, because that’s not who I am. I also thought that it’d just be a cool way of describing myself as I love to tell stories.

Alex: It places you outside of the story a little, as if you’re looking in and narrating from a different perspective, even if it’s based on your own experiences.
Alec: Right. Now we aren’t really living in the age of… Paul Simon or Bob Dylan, those were the rockstars. Now being a singer-songwriter can be a bit cliché, although you see a lot popping up lately, people like Lewis Capaldi and Dean Lewis. I was also inspired by Brockhampton, because they just own the fact they’re a boyband.

Alex: They’re reclaiming the word ‘boyband’, which became very outdated.
Alec: Absolutely.

Alex: How did you get into Paul Simon then?
Alec: My mum is a big fan, she also loves Billy Joel. My parents never bought me music or anything, but they’d always listen to those guys so that’s how I got into them. To be honest, I much prefer Paul Simon with Art Garfunkel, because they compliment each other so well. Melodically it allowed Paul Simon to reach these different levels, so with Bridge Over Troubled Water, for example, Garfunkel was the dude for that song and his voice really made that track special.

Full interview available in the latest HERO, Issue 21, HOT WIRED, available now.

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