Since leaving the Houston area at age 18, Alex Amen has embraced an itinerant lifestyle, from a commune and trailer in Southern California to years on Washington’s Vashon Island. There’s been sailboats, rock-climbing expeditions and (more recently) a presence on Brooklyn’s percolating folk scene. Along the way, music and the natural world have become parallel forces in his life, shaping a wistfully nostalgic songwriter’s craft that recalls John Denver, Gordon Lightfoot and Harry Nilsson—sometimes in a single song.
Offsetting its old-soul warmth with a striking sonic clarity, Sun Of Amen (ATO) was recorded with engineer Jonny Bell (Cage The Elephant, Sharp Pins) at Los Angeles’ Valentine Recording Studios, onetime host to such legendary acts as the Beach Boys, Frank Zappa and Jackson Brown. This impressive debut signals the arrival of a fully formed singer/songwriter seemingly disconnected from any one place or time.
MAGNET’s Hobart Rowland touched base with Amen just a few days before a short string of summer dates in Canada, where he’ll open for Kurt Vile in Vancouver.
Sun Of Amen is the work of someone who’s been gathering experiences from vastly different places and ways of living. At what point did you realize those journeys had become the foundation of your debut?
I’ve always approached songwriting by pulling from personal experience, and so much of that stuff comes from where you live and what happens to you. In that sense, I’ve always known and felt that way about the record.
In what ways are music and nature connected in your world?
They’re two big passions in my life. Some of the tracks on the record are influenced directly from my experiences in nature and the type of people I’ve met out there. Being in nature also fits really well with a certain type of genre listening. John Denver is a great example of that for when I’m driving in the Sierras. Gram Parsons when I’m in the desert. Bill Withers when I’m in Brooklyn. The more I hike and bike and drive around in nature, the more I find myself listening to a certain type of peaceful music and certain introspective artists that match my surroundings. The more I do that, the more I get inspired and influenced by that type of music.
During the pandemic, you described becoming almost a “monastic musician,” practicing guitar for up to 12 hours a day. What did that period teach you about discipline, creativity and your own inner world?
Well, it taught me how the guitar works to a certain degree. Learning guitar is an endless pursuit, but I feel I gained a much, much deeper understanding of the instrument and music as a whole. I also spent that time studying rural American folk music—and some electric-guitar styles, but that’s a topic for a different record. All of that deeply impacted the way I play and the songs I write.
Sun Of Amen balances classic songwriting traditions with a more modern sense of clarity and detail. How did you avoid turning your love of older music into a nostalgia exercise?
There are tons of artists who use traditional methods to tell a modern story. In filmmaking, I’d point to a Tarantino or a Paul Thomas Anderson. They use classic techniques like shooting movies exclusively on film, but they’re still able to make something that feels modern and fresh. The approach I took was to use a really old recording studio and record live to tape with old microphones and reverb chambers and such. But really, it’s more so in the fingers of the people who are playing the music … not to be cliché. I surrounded myself with amazing players who have a very similar approach to playing as me and shared a lot of classic influences. Johnny Bell is one of the rare people nowadays who actually knows how to use old gear and is also a great artist himself. He has his own concept of how things should sound. Then, it’s really up to the songs. People will have to be the judge of that side for themselves.
What do you think life is trying to tell you through the music on Sun Of Amen?
It’s a beautiful, tragic, wild ride.
See Alex Man live.
