INTERVIEW: Alex Lahey on her new album 'The Answer Is Always Yes': "We're all gonna die some day, I might as well see what's out there, say yes, and be positive."
Interview: Jett Tattersall
Image: Pooneh Ghana
Melbourne’s Alex Lahey first released music in 2015 and ever since has built a reputation as one of Australia’s premier indie artists. Her music is primarily indie-guitar-rock but always with a splash of pop and relatable lyrics.
She released her debut album I Love You Like a Brother in 2017, which earned her an ARIA Award nomination for Best New Artist. Gritty, indie and a little bit grungey, it was a mainstream success peaking at number 15 on the Australian Albums chart. It was followed up in 2019 by the album The Best Of Luck Club, which continued in the indie-guitar sound but with a more polished feel; it was another mainstream success hitting the top 30 in Australia.
Today Lahey releases her third studio album, The Answer Is Always Yes, her first release for Liberation Records after signing a record deal with them in 2021. While her first two albums were rooted in love and relationships, this album focuses on otherness, and how we navigate and adapt to a world we don’t fit in, or feel seen in, and always finding the absurdity and fun in life.
“Living in a world that wasn’t made for you makes you pretty strong and adaptive, and you find the fun in it,” Lahey says. “It also makes you realise how absurd everything is. With ‘The Answer Is Always Yes,’ I wanted to get weird because the world is weird, and it’s even weirder when you realise you don’t fit into it all the time.”
The Answer Is Always Yes is classic Lahey. Invigorating alt-indie-rock with plenty of guitars, it also retains elements of classic pop through the structure of the songs and some incredibly addictive melodies. Begun during the pandemic lockdowns, the album saw Lahey for the very first time collaborate with outside writers and producers during the first stages of the album.
"I've made two records doing it all by myself and now I’ve proved to myself that I can do it,” she says. “But it was also at a point where I was like, ‘If I do that again, I kind of know what it's gonna sound like’ and I don't think I'm interested in that right now. And I think [collaboration] is great because it refreshes your process, and if you are focused enough, you come out with something that sounds like you, but elevated.”
The album kicks off with the first single ‘Good Time’. Opening with a guitar squeal and an almost funky beat, Lahey’s vocal drawls and snarls as she sings about a post-covid world where everyone is allowed out of their house again, desperate for fun. “Everyone is a bit fucked up, but they think they're okay / Especially when they're out of their houses today / Forgotten how to talk, but never shut up / I want a good time, not a long time,” she sings.
‘You’ll Never Get Your Money Back’ is a rumination on searching for love and the way we attempt to fit in to find love, before realising that you have been short changed: ‘Give all you have, get nothing back / Love never leaves you in the black / You’ll never get your money back’.
‘On The Way Down’ is one of the more rockier tracks on the album, with an insistent drum beat throughout and an intense chorus, while ‘Permanent’ is the reverse, a gorgeous stripped back, semi-acoustic track which is a reflection on both the changing landscape of Melbourne and her time during lockdown when she was back living in her childhood home: “Don’t want to get used to this / In case it’s something that I will miss.”
Third single ‘They Wouldn’t Let Me In’ changes up the sound as it leans into new wave, 1970s/1980s alt-pop with forays into synthpop. It relates her experiences growing up queer and feeling locked out of the ‘normal’ life everyone else around you is enjoying. “They put me outside / They left me outside / What keeps you warm at night / It keeps me outside,” she sings.
The album ends with the title track ‘The Answer Is Always Yes’. It is arguably the album highlight, and a sonic outlier. With a minimalist beginning, the track gradually builds into a dreamy synth number - with a sidestep into stadium rock - with the most emotive and tender vocal performance from Lahey as she sings of ever constant change and to seek the positive in that: “I don’t want it all to be the same it was before it changed.”
The Answer Is Always Yes is a magnificent album that is arguably Lahey’s finest work to date. There is a confidence, and a surety in her music that elevates the whole soundscape, showcasing her versatility as an artist with a sound and a mood for every taste. We recently sat down with Lahey to chat all about her career and the creation of the album.
Hello Alex, before I ask you anything I want to say congratulations on The Answer Is Always Yes.
Thank you. That's very kind of you to say.
What a beautiful album. I love it so much, and there's a thing that, weirdly, Australia and America does so well, which is suburban Gothic. Which is what this album is for me.
That's the genre!
I can smell the bitumen, I can see the backyard. It's so visual, it's really beautiful.
That's really cool. I totally get the romance and the appeal of country life, and the open spaces, but I am a city slicker. I was born and raised in the city and that's where I feel the most comfortable. And I draw so much from that sort of lifestyle and interaction and proximity to things and people. It’s a really big part of who I am, where I come from, perhaps where I'm going as well. I don't have the retirement plan to have a little shack in the middle of nowhere. I want to be in the thick of it.
I guess society has romanticised that notion, and if you have been a city person your whole life, as much as you go, ‘yeah, let's go to the country’, it's very clear that after three days, you become Jack Nicholson in The Shining, because there's nothing else to do!
I think also the idea of space, there’s something very desirable about that to most people. And the further down the track we get, with more people being on the planet, and the cost of having space going up so much, it's kind of turning into something else. I don't really crave that as much, I'm very much a people person, not necessarily in a way that I'm super extroverted and need to be with people all the time. But it's definitely a big part of how I write songs. All of my songs, my entire life, have been about interpersonal interactions. And that's how I find my inspiration.
Absolutely. There's a real community for this album, and not just because of the collaborations, but possibly because of the places that you take us. I'm talking about ‘Permanent’ for instance, where you lyrically talk about your neighbours, and the sofa on the sidewalk, which I love. Whether it's community of friendship or relationships, as in ‘Congratulations’, it's not just an album on one person. This is an album of life.
Yeah, I mean, we're all connected. And funnily, I think that the experiences that we've had over the past few years where we were literally isolating ourselves from one another in an effort to better the community and better people as a whole, it created greater connection, greater emotional connection from those common experiences. It was almost like a paradox or something.
Absolutely. You were alone but you never wanted to be so connected. Talk to me about ‘Congratulations’. Apart from it's just so fun lyrically, it's got this very L7 energy to it, which I absolutely love. Talk to me about this track.
One of the things that is different about this record, and the way it was made, the collaborations were obviously a big part, but another part is that I started playing my guitar differently. I was tuning it differently and experimenting with that, and it's something that I had never really done before. With ‘Congratulations’ in particular, I just had my guitar tuned to an open D tuning, which for whatever reason just makes things sound a bit more emo and grungy, even though it's quite a beautiful and pretty tuning. It’s a beautiful resonant major chord. But there's something about it when you start getting the voicings out of that tuning that are really grungy. It’s your more traditional punk rock tuning. So ‘Congratulations’ is in that tuning ‘Permanent’ is in that tuning. ‘The Sky Is Melting’ was originally written in something like that, there's a few songs on the record that were like written that way. They have this kind of openness to them in the way the guitar sounds, but for whatever reason it sounds kind of hard. That’s how that song came up musically, which is maybe where you're hearing L7 from.
It's so great, because it pairs so perfectly with the stories and actually the three songs that you've mentioned, they do play out in a nostalgic way and I'm sure that’s to do with the melody, not just the experiences you're singing about. ‘The Sky Is Melting’, you're tripping on gummies listening to Michael Bolton, it's brilliant. It's a great, great thing to do! But you really paired the melody beautifully with the way you play your guitar so gorgeously. How do you usually write music? Is it usually melody first and then out come, the lyrics, or do you have a book of lyrics put aside?
I've got the more modern book of lyrics, which is the iPhone note in its various forms! I'm always writing stuff down and trying to absorb what's around me. My approach to songwriting is more of a discipline. I'm not one of those people that just has songs falling out of them, that must be nice! When you are disciplined, and you are targeting time towards songwriting, then every now and then the song does fall out. You know what I mean? One of my favourite sayings that someone told me many, many years ago is a Louis Pasteur quote, “good fortune favours the prepared mind”. It's the hundred shit songs that you grind out for the sake of writing a song that pays off, that comes out of nowhere and is brilliant. It's just practice, you know, it's like any sort of craft. So I try to make a real effort to write as much as I can, and I'm really lucky that I get to collaborate with so many other artists on their own projects as well. That's practice for me too, you're just putting in the hours, but you're also nurturing something.
The process is always different from song to song. Guitar is my main songwriting instrument, so I always come back to that. I look forward to the day that I write an album on piano - I don't know what that will be like, but I'd be really open to that process. I also use recording software and hardware to help fuel ideas. But I'm enormously lyric focused as well.
I always love it when artists, creators, anyone that's working on a craft bust open that media sold myth that people just fall out of the sky and they're naturally talented, they don't have to work, they're exceptional at 16. Because like the most of us, that's just not the case, and most everyone works really, really bloody hard. Because of that, they really, really deserve everything they've got, because they worked really hard for it.
I love that people who may not be musicians themselves, experience music as magic. That is a truly magical phenomenon. I think that's amazing and I love that as a musician. I talked about this with some of my peers and it's like, ‘don't you ever wish you had the magic back?’ Even though I'm so familiar with what's behind the veil, there are moments that I have when I listen to other people's stuff when it's that good, and the magic’s there, the magic is always there. It's just that the perception maybe shifts, or you're looking for something else. That's such an awesome part about music, it doesn't matter how familiar you are, or even how jaded you are by the process, because it is a hard process, you still get to experience the magic. Like I said, even when it's that moment where the song just falls out of you and you’re like, ‘Where the fuck did that come from?’, or when you go and see one of your heroes play and they're even better than what you thought, or when you see someone that you've never heard of before with a song that just moves you to your core. Those things, I'm really excited that I will get to experience that for the rest of my life. The magic will always be there, it just sort of comes in a different way.
I love that. By the sounds of it, among your musical peers, that you would run the risk of losing the joy of it from it becoming your job.
Totally. And that was a really big part of the decision to make this record more collaborative, I don't want this job to become predictable. I was feeling that if I was going to make this record in the same way that I made the others, I kind of knew what I was going to get. And I'm not saying it was going to be be bad, but it wasn't really something I was interested in. It wasn't something I was an interested in releasing or interested in spending heaps of time working on. I wanted something else, I wanted a different approach. And so that's why I moved forward with bringing other people into the process.
It's absolutely gorgeous, and it all comes down to your title, which is you're always saying yes. Moving forward with your music and with what you want to do. Talk to me about the title track, and how much of a through line for the whole album that phrase was.
Funnily it was perhaps the last song that was actually written for the album, but I had that line for a really long time, like, years, in my phone. I didn't go into the process with like. this is the concept, and this is what the song was going to be about. I wrote a bunch of songs and then let themes and concepts emerge from that and then was able to kind of distil what that was and let the record take its own form, and then towards the end start writing to that a little bit. But ‘The Answer Is Always Yes’, the song, I was really sure at this point in the process that the record was about the absurdities of existence and about how you can view life and humanity through all these different lenses. The one that impacted me the most was viewing it through this lens of life is unpredictable, and it is absurd, and you can push back against that, or you can kind of go with it and see what's out there. You can have these experiences, whether it’s going out and taking drugs with your friends in the desert, or moving back to your mum's because you don't have a place to live, which is a very millennial experience right now. The case that prompted this song was that I was in Los Angeles, and I was getting an Uber to a session. And the Uber driver was driving a Tesla, a save the planet kind of car, and driving like a fucking maniac. I was like, there's something so absurd about that this type of car signals a certain personality type. You get in the car, and the way that they drive has a complete total lack of consideration for other people, I just thought that in itself was really absurd, and a very postmodern kind of situation. It really lent into the idea of the record, which is the absurd and paradoxical parts of existence that happen, but seeing it through a funny lens, not getting getting down on it. Also seeing it as an existential thing. You know, we're all gonna die some day, I might as well see what's out there, say yes, and be positive.
I wanted the song to be like a series of vignettes, all of which are true, but the crux of the song has to be a very holistic statement. I always call it the t shirt statement. It's the line that's on the t shirt. I felt that in music at that time, there were a lot of records coming out that sort of had these titles that would contradict themselves, it was like this real trend. It was interesting, I'm like, God, there's such a feeling of uncertainty among people in terms of how they're experiencing life, they're unsure, and I want something that's so sure. I went through my phone and there was that line, ‘the answer is always yes’, and I'm like, that's the most certain thing that I can find right now. It ended up really speaking to me on a level that felt it was indicative of the rest of the record and what the story was.
It's so beautiful, and you're so right. It's the slogan, and funny enough, those vignettes in that track, Alan’s Morissette could have revamped ‘Ironic’ and just pulled cherry picked from them!
Yeah, it sort of is like ‘Ironic 2.0’ I suppose. Even the verse about hearing the metal band sound checking, I had a studio in Brunswick at the time, and it was on top of a venue and during lockdown, it was a really peaceful space because there were no gigs. And then suddenly, the gigs came back, which was fantastic, but Wednesday night was metal night. At at 4:30 It's they start sound checking and it's just like, ‘I can't do anything because if I record anything, it's just gonna be this bleed of really hectic death metal music coming through the vocal mic’. It’s just so funny, you know. So that was another thing that made it in the song as well.
That's what pours the love into all your music but I'm hearing particularly in this album, it's the through line of life - it always has to be a bit funny because otherwise it's just wildly depressing.
It doesn't make life easy, life isn't easy, and it's certainly not getting any easier. But with the limited time that we have here, there are some really amazing things you can experience. And the only way that you can do that is if you really lean into the discomfort to quote Brené Brown. You need to lean in and back yourself a little bit, you know, just as a person whose existing.
Alex, tell me, we have this beautiful album, what else is coming up for you?
I'm going on tour, I'm touring the record. I’m trying to learn it at the moment, relearn the songs, which always feels a bit funny. I'm touring around the US for five weeks in June, which I'm really excited about. It feels like for the first time in a really long time that I get to be in full artist mode and have this body of work and really get to live it you know? Writing it and recording it is all one thing and then it comes out and then you're living with it. And I'm excited to be doing that again after what feels like a really long time. And then eventually start thinking about the next one.
The Answer Is Always Yes is out now via Liberation/Mushroom. You can buy and stream here.
To keep up with all things Alex Lahey you can follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Alex Lahey will be touring the USA and Australia from May through to August. Tickets on sale now here
