Alex G Lets the Mask Slip | Paste Magazine

In May, one of the best songs brought into the still-young year was a bonnet of mandolin, synthesizer, drum machine, and acoustic guitar strums wobbly like a baseball card hitting bike spokes. Five months later, the tercet “Once I was a mockingbird, not an angel, but I’m your man. I can bring you back, again” knocks even more so, this time until a falsetto weeps with light. Somewhere between heaven and a TV screen, “Afterlife” sounds like music that somebody who enjoys Led Zeppelin III might feel inspired to make. Sadly, Alex Giannascoli isn’t familiar. “I don’t know that record,” he admits. It reminds me of “Tangerine,” I say back. “Well,” he replies, “I love that song.”

Any reference you may glean from Giannascoli’s work—Audioslave, Dire Straits, Sparklehorse, Elliott Smith, Califone—isn’t a product of some academic, curatorial rigor, but a means to a curious end. He says of the “muscle” he’s oft-trying to engage: “I’m trying to make myself go to the happy place every single time, and I’m consciously trying to shrug off anything that’s going to stop me from getting there.” He’s not trying to solve the equations that made the Rolling Stones or Radiohead good. He’s just “fucking around” until he gets to that happy place. “And then, as soon as I start going to my happy place, I’m gonna go as fucking hard in that direction as I can, so that I can stay happy.” If he hears a song on the radio, gets excited, forgets about it, and then rips it off when he’s recording, that’s the price he pays to go on an “inward journey.” “I’m trying to go further and further into myself,” he tells me. “Any knowledge of music I have is shit I’ve listened to.”

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Today, Giannascoli is in St. Paul, Minnesota, hours away from filling the Palace Theatre with twenty-five Alex G songs. He seems happy, almost relieved now that he and his band have found their bearings and hit a stride on tour. “It took me a couple shows to figure out what the energy of the songs were, based on how people were reacting to them in the crowd and how I felt about them,” he elaborates. “It took a little bit to settle into them, and now I feel good about them.” He’s zig-zagging across North America, playing material from his brand new album Headlights with longtime prizes woven in. “Afterlife” and “Oranges” are succeeded by “Bug,” “Kicker,” and “Brick.” “Far and Wide,” the best cut on Headlights, introduces the encore before “Brite Boy” and “Crab” conclude it. It’s the best setlist Giannascoli has ever put together.

My first Alex G show was at Mahall’s in Cleveland eleven years ago, before Giannascoli was a rock star playing 5,000-cap amphitheaters crowded with people born after 2000. Elvis Depressedly opened, I think, which makes me feel dated well enough. But it was a period for me when I was new to live music and believed that every small-time band I saw was going to blow up. You learn quickly that there’s only so much room. The concept of a “next band up” wasn’t crossing Giannascoli’s mind then. “It was always, ‘Oh, next show, we’re going to be the headliner,’ at whatever DIY spot,” he recalls. “We would open for Pinegrove and I’d be like, ‘Wow, Pinegrove’s huge. We’re opening for them in our little sphere.’” There was no predicting who would get “career-level big”; Giannascoli and his friends only saw their “status” in the context of the gigs they were driving to and from. “I don’t know what the calculation is and how people make a career out of this,” he says. “I think anybody, everybody, all the acts we played with could have made it.”

But how big was Modern Baseball in Philadelphia then? I ask.

“Oh, my God. They were enormous. I remember thinking, ‘That’s about as big as you could get.’”

Since that show in 2014, Giannascoli’s audience has gotten a teensy bit bigger than Modern Baseball’s was when You’re Gonna Miss It All started going platinum in teenage bedrooms. Alex G has 9-million listeners on Spotify now. Last January, he inked a deal with RCA and opened up for the fucking Foo Fighters. It was a pretty big leap for Bandcamp’s greatest offspring. The move was shocking but then it wasn’t: God Save the Animals, Giannascoli’s final album with Domino, was just that fucking good. Of course a major was going to throw a bag at him. It helps, too, that Giannascoli’s audience is full of young folks steering trends and driving up streams. Their stock is nearly as valuable as his. But some of us who’ve been listening since Race or Rules did question if Alex G was selling out; eventually, we conceded that RCA’s platform and resources were an opportunity for him to make a classic more instant than God Save the Animals. On Headlights, Giannascoli is singing all about that contract shit, about “mak[ing] it through to April on whatever’s left of all this label cash.” In real life, he’s on the same payroll as Britney Spears and Sleep Token.

RCA scooping up Giannascoli isn’t the underground experiment it would have been thirty years ago, like Nirvana leaving Sub Pop for Geffen. “RCA approached us like, ‘We’re not trying to change anything.’ They were trying to buy what we’ve already built and what’s there,” Giannascoli reveals. “It would be impossible for me to make these records any different than I do. Even if I wanted to ‘sell out,’ there’s nothing to sell besides just what I do. I’m not a great singer, I’m not a guitar player. There’s nothing to sell outside of exactly what I’m selling. If I didn’t have complete creative control, I don’t think they would even be interested. That’s what the product is: the thing that I create by myself.” What he’s getting at is: Alex G didn’t sell out, RCA bought in.

And they got a doozy in return. “Afterlife” was a maddening lead single, and it’s probably the most instantly likable song Alex G’s ever made—taking the mantle from 2022’s “Runner.” But there’s no “Brick” or “Bug.” No cloud-rap, Chipmunk vocal affects, or nu-metal trinkets to discover. “Louisiana” and “Bounce Boy” get there sort of, but most of Headlights has this soul-thawing coziness about it in a manner not unlike R.E.M.’s Out of Time. Is it his best album? I think that title still belongs to House of Sugar, personally. Headlights is the most “singer-songwriter-y” thing Giannascoli’s made, but he’s still reaching for attention-grabbing weirdness, as a process of “keeping myself entertained,” he says. “The weird choice for a lot of these songs was trying to subdue it more and keep subduing it—like, ‘Oh, let me take out this drum kit and make it even quieter. Let me take out these electric guitars and make them even quieter. Let me see how I can keep sucking the life out of the songs while still keeping them alive.’” In a nonsensical way, Headlights is Giannascoli’s most experimental effort to date, because it’s the first time he’s made “normal songs.”

WHEN GIANNASCOLI WAS STILL frequenting DIY spaces, nobody thought about their brand or personalities or “faking it.” “But I’m sure it played a part,” he acknowledges, “because you’re putting on a show. Everyone likes to pretend that you’re really that person on stage, but it’s impossible. The nature of this job is, whether you like it or not, you are selling a version of yourself that isn’t exactly yourself.” Posturing and pandering were currency without value, even though Giannascoli wasn’t too conscious of it. “But I still participated. Everyone does,” he relinquishes. “Even when it’s just you, and you’re starting out, and you tell yourself you’re more authentic than that… I don’t know if it’s possible to be completely authentic when you’re on stage, in front of a bunch of people, and your job is to entertain them.”

Giannascoli recently returned to a small venue, though, playing a low-key show at the Ground in Manhattan. It felt like a good antidote to focus-group images and PR-generated personas. “Do you miss anything about those kinds of gigs, when you were playing stages smaller than the vans you showed up in?” There’s an element of interacting with the crowd in those rooms and feeling close with the people that are there, he says, “in a way that makes the show feel more informal and less like you’re an object on a stage. You’re another person interacting with these people, and you’re playing songs for people, and they see you as a person, too.” At the beginning, when he could barely cobble together enough songs to fill a 20-minute time-slot, half of the people watching him were either his friends or some kids who’d wandered inside without a clue. “I feel like you can be more earnest in it. It’s not completely lost,” he says. “You aren’t a character as much as you think you are then. I always love that.”

By the mid-2010s, when Alex G was still (Sandy), Giannascoli wasn’t thought of as a particularly great performer. Captivating, yes. Technically astounding, hell no. Anything released between Race and DSU all but confirms that anyways. But I was dissatisfied when I saw him play above a bowling alley before Beach Music came out, yet “Sugarhouse” is my favorite song he’s ever done. “I’m not even sold on my abilities as a performer, to be honest,” he reveals. “I love playing shows and I like touring. I think my band is incredible. If people have criticisms of me as a performer, they’re probably valid.” But he’s gotten better! See: his Tiny Desk performance. “It’s not that I give that much of a shit, because this is my job, but I take more pride in the recording process. In terms of showing off what I can do, I don’t think about it like that. I like showing off what my band can do.”

Though ninety-percent of Headlights was recorded by Giannascoli alone, it ends just like House of Sugar did six years ago: with a live song. But while “Sugarhouse” was recorded at the Duck Room at Blueberry Hill in St. Louis seven years ago, “Logan Hotel” was filmed where the title comes from, in Philadelphia, with a miked up grand piano. “We played the song fifty times,” Giannascoli remembers, laughing. “I guess, on the fiftieth take, we were like, ‘Okay, I think we got it.’ We just ran out of time and were like, ‘That’s probably the best one.’” He likes ending his albums with live recordings because it’s a chance to get his friends—Sam Acchione, John Heywood, and Tom Kelly—involved outside of tour. It’s also a way to capstone the flow of the record, he says, and the palette of “Logan Hotel” feels “so different than the rest of the songs that it would be unbalanced for it to be elsewhere.” He thinks of Headlights’s finale as the end credits of a movie. “If you’re watching a horror movie, or something, it’s this eerie score the whole time. And then, it’s a real song from the radio—like at the end of Hellraiser, the song ‘Hellraiser’ starts playing.”

There’s a cord connecting Headlights to Beach Music, an album that turns ten years old next Thursday. “In Love” and “Far and Wide” sound kindred. The bluish, grayish palette of Beach Music’s cover parallels the bluish, grayish palette of Headlights. The former was Giannascoli’s first album on Domino. The latter is his RCA debut. He doesn’t listen to his old records anymore, nor does he remember much about them (not without enabling what he calls “extreme hindsight bias”), but he imagines that the way he felt while making Headlights persisted during Beach Music anyways. “It was always the same, where I’m like, ‘I have no fucking material, how the fuck am I gonna write another record?’ And then, slowly, get shit together. And the whole time, I’m like, ‘This sucks.’ And then I put it out and I’m like, ‘Hopefully people like it, because this shit probably sucks.’” He’s quick to clarify that he doesn’t mean “suck” in an “I didn’t work hard on it” kind of way, but that “you listen to the same ideas over and over and you start to only hear flaws. You don’t even hear the music anymore.”

Giannascoli does the thing that very few musicians ever do: He asks me a question of his own. “Is there anything in Beach Music that you hear in Headlights?” Immediately I think about hearing “brite boy, please, return to me” for the first time and having that noodly, jangly, two-bit pop solo wash over me in my childhood bedroom with the blinds shut. There’s a lot of joy in even the dimmest pockets of Alex G’s music, and Beach Music, in its heady, sloppy, and alien pitch-shifts, admissions, and low-fidelity, quiets the caustic threats of the world until all that’s left are yarns of joy. “I’m glad to hear that,” he says. “If I’m being honest, I often am surprised when I hear people say there’s a jubilant or uplifting quality to the music—not because I’m intentionally trying to make the music down or depressing, but it’s never coming from a place of jubilance, you know? The low-key stuff and the upbeat stuff all comes from the same state of mind, so it’s always news to me when something is depressing or when something is happy.”

MAKING GOD SAVE THE ANIMALS at Headroom Studios in Philadelphia, Watersong Music in Bowdoinham, and Clubhouse in Rhinebeck three years ago challenged Giannascoli. “There was an engineer in the room,” he chuckles. “Until that point, I recorded everything by myself in private. Working with an engineer, however awesome the engineer was, it was a hurdle for me to try and forget that there’s another person in the room.” When it came time to work with, by my count, at least eight engineers on Headlights, Giannascoli got “closer to that feeling of freedom again.” He also doesn’t have to make an album in a month or two’s time. The process is spread thin over a couple of years, with enough time to hone the good stuff and filter out the bad. “I’m writing and writing and writing and trying to flesh out the ideas that naturally call for more,” he says, “as opposed to just fleshing out every single idea just because.”

After putting out six LPs in five years, Giannascoli’s productivity has slowed down considerably. Ten years ago, he tells me, “there wasn’t much self-doubt or self-criticism, because I figured nobody gives a shit and nobody’s listening. There’s no stakes. It wasn’t my job, I didn’t have any reasonable expectation of it becoming my job. It was like, ‘Let me just dive in here and do it.’ It was easy to proceed with every idea, even if the idea sucked. I would be like, ‘Oh, let me just finish it now.’” Having time now, he reckons, whenever it comes, lets him focus on playing shows and being with his family. He can make a record at his own pace.

Giannascoli isn’t a perfectionist and he tells me so: “I’ve always wanted to get it as good as possible. I just didn’t understand how far I could take that when I was younger.” He does, however, believe in “getting it right.” That’s never changed, but the luxury he’s afforded now is that he can do more than one take to find it. “It’d be like, ‘I made a horrible mistake in that first take, let me do one more take. I only made a minor mistake, that’s perfect. No one’s gonna hear that mistake. It’s good to go.’ As opposed to now, it takes me five or six takes to get to the same place.” He’s still taking shit to the limit like he’s eighteen and making tunes that critics would label “slacker-ish,” but his threshold of “acceptable” was lower then, even when he was “going super hard.”

He used to discover new chords and write songs around them. On Headlights, now that he “knows what’s happening” when he’s playing the guitar, it’s more about the angles. For “Bounce Boy,” he wanted to “make a propulsive song without a bass drum.” It was a similar deal for “Louisiana,” when he wondered what where the song might go if he took the bass guitar out. “Not that that’s the beginning and end of the reason for a song,” he clarifies, “but that’s a part of keeping myself interested in exploring. The key thing is I’m trying to go to a place where I don’t know what’s happening anymore. That’s what makes it entertaining for me.”

Giannascoli isn’t one to give away what his music’s about, though most critics have assumed Headlights is his “most personal album.” Ten years ago, he’d have probably given it a college try but “ruin it”—the “it” being a hermetic mystery he now upholds by keeping quiet. Sure, I’d like to know how he got to a couplet like “love ain’t for the young anyhow, something that you learn from falling down,” but I don’t bother asking. “I got to this place about it, because I’ve tried to explain the songs in the past and realized that it was just not possible for me to do that in this way that’s satisfying for me and feels honest,” he says. “People would ask me ‘What’s this song on Trick about?’ and I would start to explain, and I would ramble and ramble and realize, like, I just don’t even know. The place I’m trying to go when I’m writing, I’m trying to get to a place that’s beyond words. That’s why music is cool. Once you start trying to explain that, you’re just murdering the inherent value of the piece of music.”

It can be frustrating too, reading interviews where Giannascoli deems his life to be “boring” or “uninteresting,” even though he played guitar on Frank Ocean’s Blonde, recently worked on Halsey’s The Great Impersonator, and has scored both of Jane Schoenbrun’s feature films. But it’s fine, I think, for Alex G to just be a kind-mannered dude who makes music because he loves it so damn much. He’s not bogged down by the kind of wild and adventurous folklore usually bestowed upon rock and rollers. “I see kids at the shows that are teenagers and, so, regardless of what my lifestyle is, I’m not trying to glamorize anything I do,” he gestures, wanting his fans to leave his shows in better shape than he would have ten, fifteen years ago. “I’m not trying to demean my life, because I think everyone has had a pretty tumultuous experience, but I remember doing things because of the artists I looked up to. And certain things are destructive. I’m not trying to contribute to that. Anything in that department doesn’t help the world. Maybe it does, but I remember learning about stuff like that and doing things that could have ended way worse for me.”

It’s impressive, really, that Giannascoli is this close to the mainstream yet so far off the grid. He hasn’t used Instagram sincerely in over a decade, keeping his social media accounts to post about show dates and album cycles only. There’s a world though, he reckons, where he comes back and uses the apps to “boost” his presence in a more intimate way. “If people stop coming out to shows and it’s like, ‘Oh, you have to make more posts for people to be engaged or buy tickets,’ I could see it. If it served a function that was tangible for me, then I’d do it.” But it has to be on his terms. “I don’t like selling something and acting like, ‘Oh, buy this thing, but you’re not just buying this thing. You’re engaging with me on an emotional, personal level.’ I don’t like mixing those worlds, because there’s something about that that feels manipulative. If I’m going to use social media, I want it to be very clear, like, ‘I am selling this thing. Buy tickets. This is a show. I’m not telling you I’m a cool person.’ Whether or not the thing came from my heart, I’m not trying to use that as a selling point.”

Alex G can be offline for as long as he pleases. He’ll still be the indie-rock ideal of my generation, because “Mission” is one of the best pop ballads I’ve ever heard. “Bobby,” too. Young bands are utilizing home recordings differently now because of DSU and Beach Music. And I imagine that, by 2030, Rocket will be looked at as one of the most influential releases of its time, especially given the recent surge of alt-country it predated. By my account, Alex G has inspired people to pick up a guitar in the same way Elliott Smith did twenty-five years ago. Or it seems that way, at least—and we’re at a point now where comparing new artists to him almost sounds like an insult to their novelty.

But the tail of Giannascoli’s influence is obvious and unavoidable now, in the inexhaustible fountain of singer-songwriters uploading their shit to Bandcamp every week and writing esoteric, pitch-manipulated, acoustic guitar hullabaloo. And this is a conversation we get to have because Headlights is so dependably good. “Sometimes I get caught up in that feeling of, ‘Oh, what do I have to offer?’” he admits. “But it’s my craft and my way of navigating the world. I’m a little bit of a lopsided person, maybe mentally and emotionally. A lot of my chips are in the creative process, so I have to do that.” The mask slips just a smidge. “And, this is how I make money, so I’m just going to keep doing it. Hopefully, I can continue to get money for doing it.”

I tell Giannascoli that I’ll keep buying his records because I want him to record “I’m Homer Simpson” someday. He laughs from his belly. “I feel like I stole that song. Ten years ago, we played with a band in a cafeteria at Ohio State, and this guy was playing accordion and another guy was playing the drums, and one of their songs was like, ‘I’m Homer Simpson.’ And I thought it was the funniest thing ever. Then, I was just goofing around on stage and played it. Hopefully the original writer can take credit for that.” After our conversation, I scour the internet for some kind of clue as to who that band was, but I can’t even find proof that Giannascoli actually played on Ohio State’s campus in 2015. He was a regular at the now-closed Double Happiness around then, so maybe it happened there. If you’re reading this and believe it was you who wrote “I’m Homer Simpson,” let me know. I think Alex G has some flowers for you.

Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Los Angeles.

COVER STORY | Alex G Lets the Mask Slip

The singer-songwriter spoke with Paste about not wanting to glamorize his lifestyle, upholding the mystery of his songwriting, and the cord that connects Beach Music to his most recent album, Headlights.