Alexa Rose - Headwaters

October 14, 2021 Max Mazonowicz

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.

Alexa Rose