Lucky Life, by Alexander

Lucky Life

by Alexander

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Record/Vinyl + Digital Album
12" Vinyl with a lyric sheet. Design by Matt Brimicombe and Katie Silver.

Includes unlimited streaming of Lucky Life via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

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$25 USD or more
Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

$12 USD or more

1.	White Knuckle 02:41		buy track
2.	Sticky 02:29		buy track
3.	Back Porch 02:37		buy track
4.	Consistency 03:02		buy track
5.	Hunter 01:26		buy track
6.	Certainty 02:23	lyrics	buy track
Things are just tangle prone There are messengers of patience Your sisters’ son took a pill Too young to pump they’re waiting I’m a dive bar lamb at the Sil Braided not related Placard cobra caught a kill Look at what was taken Heart gusher gagged without a cadence Taut memoir stuffed but also vacant So I’ll question the composition of everything To finally be certain about certainty
7.	Ribcage 02:46		buy track
8.	Lockjaw 02:18		buy track
9.	Slack 02:49		buy track
10.	Good Guy 02:17	lyrics	buy track
The way forward is a blueprint of loss wrote a bright future off with a pattern of cost Throat won’t know the critical song of how to respond to being constantly wrong I’m a bird’s nest made of zip ties I’m a shatterproof forty of fluoride On a bad night I’m a good guy The truth cratered the palatial respite of “I don’t regret it” couched in dirty regression I learned hurt isn’t power to question the gut rudder’s direction
11.	Bare Minimum 02:09	lyrics	buy track
Everyday a new eureka desexes the last A discomfort dissenter self-consciously drinks too fast I saw light near the center of my own certainty As if self-absorbed projection marked some universal relief I look for loops of applause for doing the bare minimum I congratulate myself for syncing my body with the sun Challenging chance to go ahead and strike me for the sake of my fun Giving myself the space to pity the person I helped myself become
12.	Lucky Life 02:54		buy track
13.	Wasted Case 02:14		buy track
14.	Gutter Brain 02:37		buy track

about

The 14 tracks on Lucky Life, Alexander’s latest release, are poems, the lyrics purposeful and concise distillations of feeling and image, with instrumentation and arrangements that intensify each emotional gut punch. In every song, Alex is an observer. He’s paying attention, and whatever is given his attention becomes sacred and profound. Holy kitchen table, holy denim-legged guys, holy untied shoes, holy chipped tooth: Alex writes about the everyday with clear-eyed honesty and vulnerability, and tries to see things for what they are.

The arrangements of previous Alexander records were largely improvised in the studio, but for Lucky Life, Alex took a new approach and spent most of 2023 writing the album with Mijael Maratuech on Bass, John Carney on piano, and Adam Berkowitz on drums. The album also features cello by Eliza Niemi and vocals by Heaven Schmitt, who sang on Settle Down (2018) and Wonderland (2020). He then brought it to his longtime friend and collaborator Bradford Krieger at Big Nice Studio to produce and record the album. Tracked live, the songs on Lucky Life evoke a strong sense of space, of three-dimensional sound.

Alex’s lyrics capture the sense of a mind at work, someone turning it all over, parsing through all the input, the stuff of life. They are raw and unpretentious. Moments of self-conscious confession (“admittedly silly but light became you”) sit against simple scenes (“Dive bar lamb at the Sil”) sit against moments of regret (“I wish you knew I just needed food”).

There’s a sense of a longing for connection at work here, too, of late-night loneliness. In “Lucky Life”: “Then I heard laughing and felt understood, more than I ever thought that I could.” “In “Ribcage,” a spoken word ode to youth and to friendship, there are moments of extreme tenderness, of care - “they will never hold your pulsing ribcage and wipe your nose in the morning” - set to the drum’s steady, pulsing heartbeat. Throughout the album, the instrumentation and arrangement spans a full range of emotions: there’s softness, quiet contemplation, solemnity, then joy, whimsy, plucky arpeggios, then times when it’s all swallowed up in a chorus of grand sweeping sections of distortion and saturation.

Lucky Life as a whole sounds like the constant trying that makes up a life, that makes up the process of living. There’s this sense of the work of routine, and the pauses in between the routine, the relief from everyday struggles: it feels like the moment on your bike when you’re coasting downhill after a steep climb. Or the moment when you stop feeling hungover and all of a sudden you start to feel better: you’re a little shaky, but the light is beautiful, the water is perfectly cold. Lucky Life is the feeling of gratitude that comes in the face of - or even, sometimes, because of - your own stupid choices. When Alex sings “now move with intention/focus, notice the tendency to bullshit/Wake up, Alex, to know is not to practice,” there’s a sense of someone mustering up the strength to move forward, and when we hear it we find that we can muster up that strength, too.

- Jillian Jackson

credits

released April 5, 2024

Singing + Guitar : Alex Fatato
Piano + Keyboard : John Carney
Bass : Mijael Maratuech
Drums : Adam Berkowitz
Guitar + Synthesizer : Bradford Krieger
Cello : Eliza Niemi
Singing : Heaven Schmitt

Recorded, Mixed, Mastered by Bradford Krieger at Big Nice Studio in Lincoln, Rhode Island

license

about

Alexander Boston, Massachusetts

contact me at Alexanderfromboston@gmail.com

discography

Lucky Life

Apr 2024
EP2

Apr 2023
Difficult Freedom

Oct 2021
EP1

Jul 2020
Wonderland

Feb 2020
Settle Down

Oct 2018

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