Alex Amen: “It’s hard to put the finger on exactly that California sound is, but it definitely exists"

Alex Amen’s life reads like a beat novel rewritten for a new Americana age. It’s part Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, part Laurel Canyon songbook – and all restless road, wild nature and instinctive songwriting. Texas born, Alex left home at 18 and drifted through a Southern California commune.

He then holed up in a Hollywood trailer, spent the Covid years on a remote island in Washington’s Puget Sound, and sailed boats on the ocean. After scaling cathedral-scale rock faces, he eventually shored up in the Brooklyn folk scene.

It’s the sort of backstory that would feel suspiciously over-mythologised if the music did not bear it out. Amen’s songs arrive with the weathered ease of old American records, but they are not museum pieces.

There’s something alive and unforced in them – a mix of Gulf Coast childhood, mountain air, bluegrass discipline, Gram Parsons warmth and a zealous searching spirit.

After releasing an EP – The Zorthian Tapes – and a handful of singles, Amen has already found himself on heavyweight festival bills, including Pitchfork London, Newport Folk Festival and Austin City Limits.

Newly signed to ATO Records, he now releases his debut album, Sun Of Amen.

Recorded partly at the legendary Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles, it draws on classic songwriting traditions without lapsing into cosplay or nostalgia. There are echoes of Elton John’s melodic sweep, Neil Young’s wide-open melancholy, John Denver’s open sky wonder, Gordon Lightfoot’s narrative grace and Randy Newman’s literate songcraft.

But Amen’s voice – tender, watchful and quietly commanding – belongs to his own remarkable map. Indeed, when I ask if he was brought up listening to such influences, he grins widely.

“My parents had an appreciation for older music and some good music,” he replies. “But they weren’t like some of the kids that I’ve now met, whose parents had Bob Marley, Bob Dylan and Bob Weir – all the Bobs – on their wall.”

Initially, when Alex left Texas, he moved to California to study film.

“I went to do a documentary about high adventure climbing stuff,” he explains. “I’d seen a lot of the Sender films and the Jimmy Chin stuff, and documentaries like Mountain Of Storms and Endless Summer, which have beautiful cinematography paired with humans doing something interesting.

“It was like, well, ‘If I have to go to school, maybe I can graduate, live in an old truck and climb’. I didn’t last in it, because I didn’t care as much about making films at that point in my life as I did about making music.”

Playing piano since he was a kid, Alex started playing guitar in high school.

“I was really into Nirvana,” he recalls. “I loved Mac DeMarco, The Shins, Fleet Foxes, Father John Misty and a lot of those Sub Pop bands. I also really liked Neil Young. Something that was really influential was just watching music documentaries. I remember watching one about 1970s music.

CRAZY HORSE

“I dived into that stuff. I just wanted to educate myself. ‘The Flaming Lips – what are they picking up on?’ Or Mac DeMarco, it turns out his solos are like Grateful Dead. It’s like, ‘Oh, that’s so Jerry!’”

Alex’s first band, American Slang, were a gang of psychedelic folk-rockers who, judging by the sleeve of their self-titled debut, had clearly spent time at the altar of Crazy Horse. Though the record itself carries more than a whiff of early Creedence.

“Sure,” he agrees. “I love that music, but it wasn’t really until I moved to California that I started to listen to CCR albums. Green River, it’s just so raunchy, you’re like, ‘Oh, this is sick!’. Or like Van Morrison, I grew up with ‘Brown Eyed Girl’ at swim receptions. Then you get older, smoke a joint, listen to ‘TB Sheets’, and you’re like, ‘Oh yeah, I get it!’ So it’s a long process of discovery.”

The self-produced production on Sun Of Amen is exquisite.

“It was done at Valentine Recording Studios in Los Angeles,” Alex explains, “and also at a studio in Long Beach called Jazz Cat Studios. The guy who engineered it, Johnny Bell, is great. I started recording American Slang at Valentine when I was 18.

“But the record that came out was actually recorded at my grandparents’ ranch in Texas, because Covid shut everything down and we had to stop recording at Valentine. The entire studio at Valentine is from the late 1940s through the 1970s, and nothing’s been changed.”

Sun Of Amen feels like the record where everything Alex has lived through – finally comes pouring into the songs. Was he, in some sense, on that great old troubadour’s search for a lost America?

“Where I grew up in Texas was very consistent,” he replies. “As a kid, I was really attracted to stories in films and books that were about the opposite of mundane. I think the experience of going to California, and then finding my way to Washington, it’s like your inner desire creates your reality. I just wanted to experience the full depth of life. Through that, you meet people who are like-minded, and then life has a way of pulling you in these crazy directions.”

For all the ready-made romance of Alex’s backstory, he is pleasingly immune to his own mythology. When I ask what life in a California commune was actually like, he smiles and offers the least psychedelic answer imaginable: “Why are there so many goddamn dishes in the sink?”

When I ask about his time spent living in isolation on Vashon, an island in Washington’s Puget Sound, he says, “I have a song on my EP called ‘And Her Colors’, which would probably say what it’s like better than I could. It’s hard to put language on what it’s like to live in rural Washington. Like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, there’s a darkness and the supernatural; there’s also an intense beauty that’s very much seasonal.

NIRVANA LYRIC

“It’s like the Nirvana lyric ‘Weather changes moods’. It’s true – it rains, but you also get these intense periods of beauty and sun. There’s an old guy that I knew up there, and he said, ‘Living in the Pacific Northwest is like being in love with a beautiful person who’s always sick…’”

There’s a strange trick Sun Of Amen pulls off – if you found it buried in a crate, and someone told you it came from that Randy Newman/Elton John golden age of songwriting, you might believe them. It never feels like pastiche or nostalgia, but it definitely does sound Californian.

“This record,” explains Amen, “is in a certain sonic space. Like, it’s really hard to make a soul record sound like a Motown record. You could play all of the same notes, but there’s some magic that’s really hard to get. The same exists for California country and folk music.

“It’s hard to put the finger on exactly that California sound is, but it definitely exists. If you listen to The Burrito Brothers, The Mamas & the Papas or Merle Haggard, there’s something there that’s interesting. Maybe it’s the certain type of glyphosate they spray on all the fruit in California nowadays – I don’t really know what it is.”

• Sun Of Amen is out now.