Genre:Pop
<p>“I’m essentially homeless,” Alex Winston says, her laughter mixing with the squawk of seagulls during a recent blue-tinted early evening on a patio in Venice, California. “I left New York to work on the new record out here and never got a place. I kind of like it. I guess I’m a little weird that way. I really don’t like being in one place.”
<br>Alex Winston draws you in with her upfront, unfiltered banter, saying things in a conspiratorial trust normally reserved for longtime friends. Spend more than a few minutes with her and you’ll find that secrets are things she’d rather not keep. She spreads them about the table before her like strange specimens to dissect with the dull butter knives left by the waiter. She wants to get at some truth about herself, her music, or even you. She is invigorating to be around. Sitting crosslegged atop her barstool, staring into her coffee cup, you can almost sense the dervish at rest inside of her, the one she lets out mostly onstage, but in brief glimpses when sharing another’s company.
<br>“Sometimes it's difficult for me to talk about these things, because I don't want to lie,” she says, trying her best to talk about her first single without, well, talking about her first single. “The single ‘Careless’ is about... let's say, it's about experiencing things and being uninhibited. I was trying to open myself up to new experiences and I've always struggled with that.”
<br>She has since returned to New York City and is currently wrapping up work on her forthcoming album, This Ain’t Luck, out this spring. This is her second full-length LP, coming on the heels of The Sister Wife EP (2011) and King Con (2012). Three years is an eternity in popular music, but that time has given Winston some hard-earned wisdom. She feels betrayed by the major label system, mostly because she betrayed herself. She let her instincts get drowned out by all the noise and promises and guarantees that flap around the inside of record executive suites like trapped birds. This time, she refuses to let that inner voice become disconnected from the one that sings.
<br>“You can't have it all,” she says, smiling sarcastically, thinking back to her mismanaged debut. “I am very controlling. I am very private. It's a weird thing. It’s what makes it especially hard when it's the second time around and thenyou decide to be personal. You’re just asking for it.”
<br>The “it” here is criticism, scrutiny, the feeling of being exposed even though the exposure is self-inflicted, an openness she has never allowed herself to indulge in musically. She is going with her instincts this time, her gut, but now she knows fear is fuel, something to use and not suppress. Before, comparisons to everyone from PJ Harvey to Joanna Newsom to Kate Bush (especially Kate Bush) might have rankled her enough to growl. But, now...now things are different. Winston is at ease, newly confident.
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<br>“I don't mind it. I think those are all amazing artists. I'll take it. But I think people might get tired of hearing about people sounding like Kate Bush. I understand it. You have to compare it to something, I guess.”
<br>In this world, every singer is Sinatra, every band the Beatles. Music journalists are often plagued by an epidemic of laziness, a kind of ear fatigue. Comparisons are the easy way out. But Alex Winston deserves the extra effort of reaching for a new vocabulary. You might just have to hear a track like “We Got Nothing,” the album’s second single, and write something brand new. “There are no words for the things we saw,” Winston sings. That sounds about right. That sounds like Alex Winston now.
<br>The title track is built atop a percussive thrum that is nearly circulatory, as if Winston’s words were travelling veins, her voice the essential portion of some weird biology that keeps the whole thing living and breathing. Yet, hidden within is a biting dedication “to the goons and the ghosts who threw my love away,” signaling that Winston is readily exposing that part of herself that is simultaneously vulnerable andresilient. “Cruel” is more upfront, a past-tense ode to her old vulnerability, of being led astray by charm. But that won’t happen again.
<br>“It's a New York record,” she says, weeks later, confident after her foray out West (and despite her roots in Detroit where she was born) that New York City might have finally offered her the stillness she needs right now. “Mission Sound in Brooklyn. Catherine Marks [whose credits include PJ Harvey, Death Cab for Cutie, and Interpol] is producing it. We've been going through some of the same personal stuff and she cares about the music so much. That's what I needed. I was struggling to find the person that fully understood where I'm at and knew what to do with the songs. She's just so incredible. I'm really happy that I found her.”
<br>Alex Winston might be closer than she realizes to inhabiting the present, that resting place she has found so elusive for too long. She is no longer homeless. In fact, she never was.
<br>“I just never live in the moment. I'm trying hard to do that now,” she says, from a couch in New York that isn’t hers. “But everything’s in storage. I don’t live anywhere!” Oh, but Ms. Winston you do. You live in these new songs. You live in the melodies and the words. You live in the experience that informs them. Most of all, you live in the moment and that moment is now.</p>