Alexa was immersed in music from an early age. Both her brothers and her Dad played guitar, and she sang with her Mom. She took voice lessons from the age of five, started classical voice training at seven, and went on to study musical theater through high school at OCSA and then at Elon University. After graduation, Alexa took a lead role on Holland America’s World Cruise Line, performing signature show numbers every evening. She was en route to Broadway.
But despite the successful theater career ahead of her, Alexa found herself on a trajectory that was unsatisfying and lackluster. As Alexa puts it, “Musical theater’s ‘Be Honest’ and tell-the-truth training taught me how to tell other people’s stories as if they were my own. But because they weren’t my own, there was no real passion.”
In her late teens, Alexa found herself at a concert of Nickel Creek and The Wailin’ Jennys. “Hearing that music made something in my whole being come alive. My heart was fully ablaze and something shifted in me,” she says. Was it that it was the first time she was moved by music that was different from her family’s bent for classic rock or her career’s liking to musical theater? Was it the Celtic and Scottish influences in the music that resonated with the same heritage that is buried in her bones? Was it the deep, loomy soulfulness that struck a chord in her being? For the first time she felt invited to create something of her own.
Alexa moved to Portland, Oregon, and entered into the terrifying, exhilarating, and nourishing journey of becoming a songwriter. Accompanied by a mandolin, she worked on expressing her personal narrative through voice.
It was a long and sometimes hesitant process—she even took a three year hiatus from songwriting and moved to Boulder, CO before getting back on track with an understanding that the way forward was through embracing her vulnerabilities. Her music turned from vague stories about life’s lessons and focused on the rawness of the “why” underneath.
The result of this new-found writing clearly manifests itself on her new EP, a symbol of her complete self and a demonstration of what she feels her life has been leading her toward. As a result of her background and experience—from formal classical and musical theater training to a soulful connection to folk and country—Alexa’s music is both subtle and dramatic. Big instrumentation weaves through her lyrical expression of the boundless aspects of nature. She describes it as akin to a “hummingbird, one of the smallest creatures, yet seldom unnoticed in its vastness.”
