Alexa Rose - Headwaters
Following her excellent debut from 2019, Medicine For Living, isn’t an easy task for Alexa Rose but with Headwaters she has somehow managed to surpass it. It’s a wonderful, beautiful album, exploring many themes but never feeling overwhelming. Alexa’s voice carries the music, sometimes light and acoustic-y (‘1999’), and at times fuller (‘Wild Peppermint’ piano, drums, and violin).
“When I was sitting alone in my room in the southern summer heat, windows open, humidity fuming, a song called Human poured out of me. It was August, and all summer there had been such a tremendous sense of humanity, revolution, justice coming up against division, misinformation, fear. Like most regular, feeling people, I had such a strange mixture of emotions: grief, excitement; solidarity with the ways people across the world were showing up to love and support one another. I wanted so badly to run outside and be a part of it all, right then and there in that moment. But I was stuck at home. And in that strange swelling of simultaneous loss and the richness of witnessing so much kindness, I remember laying on the bed with the guitar, staring at the ceiling, and just singing “I wanna go downtown and look some stranger in the face.” I would be happy to see anyone. I just really want to hug someone. To jump into some icy swimming hole. To feel the surge of aliveness. And I felt so imperfect and raw, but I knew so did everyone else.”