Alex Wong sits down for a One On One Session in Raleigh, NC on December 14th, 2019. For more info visit: https://alexwongsounds.com Video by: Ehud Lazin
Alex Wong creates music to help people remember who they are and show themselves to the world.
Alex has always had a complicated relationship with his memories. Years ago, he noticed with shock that he couldn’t remember his own childhood birthday parties that his sister would recount to him. At the same time, his mind has always been filled with vivid, sensory memories from dreams, places he’d never been, and what seemed almost like isolated vignettes from another life.
That dissonance led to the songs on his latest album, The Elephant and the Seahorse (2020, Tone Tree Music). The name pays homage to the famous memory of elephants, as well as the part of the brain that controls memory in humans, the hippocampus, shaped like a seahorse and named after its genus.
“As I examined my most vivid memories, I realized many of them were not from waking life, but of dreamscapes and detailed snapshots from places I'd never been.” One such memory depicts a scene where Alex is floating on a bed above a bottomless ravine between a mountain and a beach city at night, seeing giant mossy orbs with giant redwood trees growing from them, rotating slowly and silently. He attempts to describe this surreal scene musically in his piece “Nocturne,” the midway point on the album.
Many of his memories focused on the connective tissue between the past and present. After being told by two separate psychics, years apart, that he’d had many past lives in Paris and needed to walk around the city and find his old house, he was inspired to actually take that walk, described literally in the lyrics for “Me, Forever.” “I love the idea that who we are might actually be the sum of many lives, stacked on top of one another.”
There were painful memories too. As he allowed himself to look more honestly at his past, he was forced to acknowledge that he had been “hiding” his identity as a second-generation Asian American for much of his life. Memories of being told to downplay his ethnicity in order to succeed in school, social groups, or in the mostly white music industry, assimilate to white culture as a kid, speak with no accent, and keep himself small rushed to the surface, along with waves of shame and anger for buying into this conditioning.
“It got to a point where a white person would say “I don’t even think of you as Asian!” or “You’re attractive for a Chinese guy” and I would actually take it as a compliment because it meant my efforts to minimize that side of me were working.”
It came to a head when, while writing his two-act theatrical musical The Paper Raincoat, he suddenly realized that he had made all the characters white… for no other reason than the story was not explicitly about race. “It was shocking to realize that I had been so conditioned to think of white as the default, the blank canvas on which you can tell universal stories, that I didn’t even think that someone who looked like me could tell my own story!”
A lot of deep questioning followed, which he chronicles for the first time in his song “Show Yourself,” containing one of the most personal and vulnerable lyrics he’s ever written:
I miss the sound of my father’s Chinese
Fading in the suburban breeze
Why do I run from what I used to be
Why am I hiding from my history?
“I try to make everything I create sound as ‘visual’ as possible, as if the music is a map leading back to a specific time and place. My hope is that listening to the music might help lead someone back to the authentic places in themselves that they’ve forgotten, and empower them to share that with the world. I believe those places are where our true power lives.”
Alex is a Latin GRAMMY-nominated artist and producer known for his work with Delta Rae, Vienna Teng, Melissa Ferrick and Ari Hest, among others. Alex’s music has been featured in movies The Last Song and The Lincoln Lawyer, TV shows True Blood, Ray Donovan, and One Tree Hill, and commercials for Google and Aquafina. Alex has toured all over the world, performing at festivals like Coachella, Outside Lands, and Corona Capital, in arenas in Mexico City and theaters in Europe and Japan, and on NPR’s Mountain Stage. During the lockdown, Alex curated and performed two virtual benefit tours featuring AAPI artists MILCK, Ruby Ibarra, Vienna Teng, Amulets, and Tom Prasada-Rao as well as Ben Sollee, Ruthie Collins, Garrison Starr, and others. The tours raised $10,000 to help organizations fighting anti-Asian hate via TheQuietVoiceFund.org
Alex’s current releases include The Elephant and the Seahorse and KIVALINA, a duo album with Jesse Terry inspired by stories of climate change. He plans to release an NFT with oil painter Kenny Harris, and continue to create musical maps to help lead us all back to our truths.
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