Alexa Lash Perspective on Missing
Really, I just want to get my music out to as many ears as possible. My overarching goal is connection - I want to connect to my audience - be it through performance, through lyrics, or through experience.
I'm sure that my experience with music started in the crib, but I remember vividly standing in front of a keyboard in my grandma's house letting the automated music play and dancing around a large room. I think I was 6 or 7. I didn't learn anything then. I didn't even learn how to play piano seriously until 2020, but in that same room I listened to Chapel of Love by the Dixie Cups on repeat. I listened to it on tape from an old tape player.
I've always loved music. I've always wanted to perform. I was in my elementary school chorus back in the 90s and as I got older, I was talked out of pursuing music with any sincerity. I'm not going to blame my family. It was the culture of the time. "You gotta go to college. Get a good job. Buy a house. Have a family of your own."
But music was always in my heart, it was the breath in my lungs, the rhythm of my poetry. My imposter syndrome was also partially to blame. I was confident about my writing, but not about my voice. And it wasn't until 2017, after years of karaoke bar singing and poetry writing, that I went to my first open mic night. The rest has really been history.
This release is part of the singer-songwriter world. It's a lullaby. Is, "will rock you to sleep" a genre?
Alanis Morissette. I adore her and her lyrics and her positions on mental health. But there are so many women who started in the 90s that I would be honored to tour with. It's the era of music I gravitate towards most.
I write a lot about love and romantic relationships, and I love those songs. But I’ve been writing so much about the other kinds of relationships that exist in our lives: relationships with family, friends, the world. And above all, the relationship to yourself.
Missing explores on family relationships. It's about looking back on your childhood, and realizing how it's affected you in your present. The longing that can come from needing parental love as an adult. Because really, you never stop being a kid.
That if you have music in you, really have it in you, you can't stop doing it. Even if you stop doing it professionally. I use the cliche often that making music is as necessary as breathing, but it's true.
This is probably the most random answer I'm ever going to have, but this piano piece has stuck with me for as long as I can remember: Tchaikovsky's Romance in F Minor, Op. 5. I bought a random classical music CD from an FYE in high school, and it was my favorite piece.
It's emotion in sound.
"You've got the kind of voice that you could have totally been a mermaid and lead men to their demise."
