INTERVIEW: Alex Hosking on single 'Need Your Love' and creating dance music: "There’s so many incredible women in dance music, behind the scenes and out the front singing the songs."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Australia’s Alex Hosking is one of the country’s biggest unknown singers. Over the past two years she has co-written and performed as the featured vocalist on DJ PS1’s smash hits ‘Fake Friends’, which climbed into the top 20 singles charts in the UK, and ‘Life Goes On’. The tracks have to date amassed over 90 million streams
Last year she released the single ‘Need Your Love’ with UK producer Majestic, a driving synth-dance track which evokes feelings of complete abandonment on the dance floor in the best nightclub in town. This year a new Just Kiddin remix of the track was released, pushing the track to close to 4.5 million streams on Spotify alone.
“‘Need Your Love’ was written at the start of the pandemic,” Hosking says. I had just been separated from my boyfriend who is from America. The opening line “sometimes I wonder if I had to, could I ever let you go?” - was a reflection of having to say goodbye to my boyfriend overseas and not knowing when I would see him next. Fast forward and I was back in London and the first in person session I had was with Majestic! We hung out, we wrote a song, we ate food and then I showed him ‘Need Your Love’ and immediately he asked for the song to be sent to him and he started working on the production! A whole year later the song is out, and it is just the best feeling to have a song out that you are truly proud of and that I got to write with good friends in a really vulnerable time.”
Hosking has been writing and releasing music for several years now, both for herself and other artists, and is now being recognised as one of Australia’s top talents - both behind and in front of the microphone. She is truly an artist to keep a close eye on we recently caught up with her to find out more about her music and her career.
Alex hello and welcome home to Australia for a short spell. How does it feel to be back?
I love Australia! I've been hiding away in Adelaide and it's just the best feeling. I feel like I hop off the plane and I just deep breathe, I love being home back in Australia. It's been super, super nice.
I want to talk to you about ‘Need Your Love’ and all its joy. I know it doesn't come from a place of joy, but damn, it's fun to dance to and sing along to. Can you please talk me through this beautiful track?
Through all of this madness that's been the last couple of years, it was my very first Zoom session writing a song. I didn't know how that was going to go, it was all foreign territory. I jumped into a Zoom with one of my friends called Jonasu, who has the song ‘Black Magic’ and we've written a lot together in person so that took a bit of the pressure off. I had just been separated from my partner who was in America at the time and I didn’t know when I'm going to see him again, no one knew what was going to happen. That was sort of the starting point of the song. I was able to get over to the UK, and the first session I had before the UK went into a massive lockdown was with Majestic and then it was a weird story there. He lives a little out of London so I caught the train out to go see him and the email instructions were ‘message me when you get here and I'll come pick you up from the train station’. So I messaged him and he said ‘I was told you had the mumps, I cancelled the session and I've booked another session with a bunch of rappers doing a grime session today’. I went anyway so we ended up having this really awesome hybrid session of dance and grime. Everyone was showing their next songs, and Majestic was like ‘what's your next song Alex?’ I played him ‘Need Your Love’ and he was like, ‘oh my god, I'm obsessed, send me all of the stems, I want to I want to have a go at this’. And then it went into lockdown again and that was my like first and last session with Majestic! It’s a crazy story!
What a beautiful way to create modern music! So it was a long time coming, how does it feel to have it out and everyone dancing to it?
It's just the best thing ever and there was an emotional element to the song which is a little bit different to my other stuff, I keep it like 120 BPM. It was nice to write something that reflected the feelings and the emotions that were there at that period of time because it was just such uncharted territory, no one knew what was going to happen. To have Majestic do his thing, he is such a specialist at house music, it was such an iconic moment to have one of the greats jump on the record. We saw with ‘Rasputin’, his remix of the Barney M song that just went like wildfire, he's so so good at what he does.
What I love about your music is it manages to be both radio play and club floor friendly and that's a really hard line to walk without doing a disservice to one or the other. I'd love to hear your thoughts how you go about that execution and if it's intentional?
Firstly, thank you very much, I appreciate that compliment. I write hundreds of songs, I've got a catalogue of way over 1000 songs, I write a song every single day. It's so important that I'm able to do dance music that you can hear in a club on Friday night with your girlfriends having a good time, that's so important to me, but I also want it to be as radio friendly as possible so that at 7am, when you're driving to a job that you don't like, and your boss has been giving you a hard time or whatever, it still makes you feel good. I want it to be able to work both ways, so I do consciously think of that. At the end of the day, having such amazing collaborators who understand all of the dance elements, and the importance of the chords and everything, we really sit down, and we really work on those parts to get it sounding correct. There's a magic in also being able to strip a song back, and with all of my songs I always do acoustic versions. That's really important as well, because if a song can hold itself with just a guitar or a piano, then you know it's a good song, and all the elements that come in after are just added bonuses. It is constantly a juggling act, and that's why I'm always in the studio, always writing.
You're a soloist but you’re collaborating consistently and you were writing before you came out and released your own stuff. I imagine that to step into these spaces as young woman must be so daunting. Did you ever feel like you had to pretend to be someone else or you had to be a bit louder in those spaces in order to have your opinion heard?
100% I work in a male dominated industry, let's just start there! And then I've gone to the next one, which is dance music and when you think dance music you think DJ and when you think DJ you instantly think ‘dude’, and that has been one of the hardest things. I'm really thankful of my team, I have really amazing women in my posse and they empower me all the time. A lot of my mentors and so many incredible female songwriters and producers, and A&Rs, that's been one of the most amazing things that wasn't even on purpose or planned. It just sort of happened early on and I'm so incredibly thankful for that because I didn't know any differently. I walked in the same way everyone else did through the door! At this point, I'm really thankful that I can pick and choose who I work with and I'm an equal. I'm there to make a song and everyone respects everybody that walks in, we're all equals. All egos are left at the door, otherwise you can't create a good song. That's been one of my biggest things that I've learned. There’s so many incredible women in dance music, behind the scenes and out the front singing the songs. People like Becky Hill,. I just aspire to be like them. It's really cool when you see other artists paving the way.
it's gorgeous and it's so refreshing to hear as well, that there's just a lot of joy and hope, but at the same time from a place of understanding that is has not always been that way. You've got 1000 songs in your catalogue, and you're clearly a lyricist. Has it always been like this? What came first, the poetry or the melody?
I was always singing and I was always songwriting and I just thought that everybody was writing songs in their princess journal at 10. I just thought everyone did that and was performing them to their parents. Like, that's what I did for fun. And it just continued on from there. I'm severely dyslexic, so the hilarious thing with all of this is I discovered reading, history books and stuff after I was told that I will never be able to read or write and my teachers had sort of written me off. My piano teacher had written me off [as well] and I started to read and then all of a sudden it turned into poetry, and then it started to turn into all these different things. That's where the writing sort of started to come into it and I started to teach myself piano. It was a weird one but I just thought everyone did it!
It’s a beautiful lesson as well. There’s so much more awareness around dyslexia in schools, and why so many adults were just written off as children. Because of that, what have we missed from not hearing those songwriters? Clearly, there was nothing in your education that introduced you to that history book or that poetry book, you actually went chasing it yourself. And that's incredible you must be sticking it to your teachers, you're like, ‘guess what I do for a job!’
I want to so badly go and talk to my English teachers now and be like, ‘look at me!’ I got along so well, with the librarian, I always had my like nose in a book, I was always in the library from the moment I was able to read and it all started to make sense and the words on the page weren’t jumbled up. I also think there's something so magical about being dyslexic, a lot of the creators that I work with are and they use that other side of the brain. Because sometimes the words are jumbled up on the page, we're able to pull on things that other people might not have considered or thought because it's just processing in a different way. It's really interesting, so many of my collaborators are dyslexic, so there's something in there.
That's a beautiful story. I wanted to talk to you about your debut single ‘Monsters’. Again, we've got a very catchy vibe. I heard you wrote it in the back of an Uber?
Yes! When I first started going around the globe and writing songs, and still to this day, I would get so nervous before going into a session I would write the song before entering the session so I would have something just in case. That sheer anxiety of stepping into the room, like impostor syndrome, ‘I'm not good enough, I shouldn't be in this room, everyone has all studied music, they're so good’ And so, I would do that. Even with ‘Fake Friends’ I did the exact same thing, I wrote the song prior to being in the room. I don't know, maybe it's a control thing too, I just like having that moment of processing to be able to be like, ‘this is what I want to write about today.’
Did you know that ‘Monsters’ was going to be your debut song? You'd had so much work beforehand, collaborating with all sorts of people, I imagine then going, ‘Oh, but this is me’, there must have been some pressure?
Yeah…it's funny, you know when you've created something that is special, and everyone in the room is like, ‘Oh, this was like a good session’. But at the same time, you just never know and with ‘Monsters’ that sat around for a couple of years before it ever saw the light of day. So many DJs did versions of it, it was going to be a dance song, and then I stripped it right back and wanted to release it acoustically. Most of my songs get written quite acoustically, I really want the songs to be able to hold that integral part, as I was saying before if you can play it on the piano it should sound great in any other form. It took ‘Fake Friends’ three or four years to see the light of day, it's always a funny journey. I love hearing other songwriters talk about their hit songs and how long they sat around and then some other artists came along and picked it up, and then all of a sudden, you know, so and so's releasing the song. You never really know when the song is going to have its moment.
Also, I guess a lot of that comes to do with like the collective society's feeling at the time. ‘Fake Friends’ was just so welcome when it came out and also the video with it was so funny. Quite possibly when you wrote it a couple of years ago, maybe we weren't ready collectively to enjoy the humour in that.
It's true, everything happens for a reason. When a song breaks and does the thing, it's a bit of dumb luck sometimes as well. You just never really know what's going to happen. We didn't know when we put it out, we just loved the song. That's all it is. I always tell other people, if they're getting nervous or whatever about releasing, I'm like ‘Do you love the song? If you love the song it doesn't matter if it gets one listen, or if it gets a million listens.’ Bottom line that is all you can do. Otherwise you'll kind of go crazy.
Absolutely. You create dance music and during the pandemic is was making dance music with nowhere to dance except your kitchen, which by the way is a great place to dance. How did you navigate that?
It was interesting actually. With the use of social media through this lockdown, a lot more singer-songwriter artists were coming through and we saw some incredible artists really have these amazing breakthroughs internationally which was just so cool. Ultimately if I'm just being true to myself and following my dance roots. I can sit down and start playing a song on the piano and that would work but for me at my core of 120 BPM and up that's what makes me happy. I always say don't get me in to write the sad song, get me in to write the song that is designed to be played at 3am in a club, sweaty and you’ve just kissed somebody on the dance floor and you're trying to work out if you want to take them home or not - that's my energy!
We've got music. We've got you back in Australia for a little bit. What is coming up for you, Alex?
So I’ve just put out ‘Need Your Love’. I've been working really hard, obviously, I have a very hefty catalogue of lots of songs and I’m just dying to keep on putting music out. So we've got a bunch of new releases coming out and then hopefully starting to do some more live performances. Everything's been opening up and it's just so great to be in person again. So just lots more: lots of live, lots more music.
‘Need Your Love’ is out now, You can download and stream here.
To keep up with all things Alex Hosking you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
