Alexa is a pseudonym for my old roommate’s ex-girlfriend. She was kind of a C-list celebrity/international model, and had been “dating” my roommate for a small period of time. He was swooning over her, while she was more oriented around her influencer ventures. The song came out of him staying awake one time for days wondering where she was, after she spent days at a time “off her phone”.
Words by Jason Lee; Photography by Michelle LoBianco
So explains Ryan Zakin, bassist and vocalist for NYC-based dynamic duo Gardenia with the duo’s other half being animal-membrane-beater Tamir Malik with Tamir and Ryan first meeting due to being co-workers at a local recording studio and btw fret not animal-lovers, most drum-heads are made of synthetic materials these days…
…but anyway for a musical party-of-two comprised entirely of drums ’n’ bass, neckties ‘n’ blazers, T&R have got real range, nimbly moving between White Stripes-style bombast (see: “Hall Pass”), Moldy Peaches-style whimsy and emotional intimacy (see: “Believe Me (Or Don’t)” or “I Hope Ur Crying”), and Quasi-style satiric pop-psychedelia (see: “Mattress Actress”) amongst other moods for moderns all while maintaining the inherently soul-baring qualities of a musical format that leaves nothing to hide behind…
…besides sharp riffs, sharp lyrical commentary (tho’ rarely heavy-handed) and sharp togs which taken together bring to mind the vaunted days of 2-Tone ska or ska-wave as it’s probably called now (granted, Gradenia don’t really do ska or not yet anyway) with besuited rude boys channeling the turmoil and feverish fervor of their times just as Gardenia seek to do for ours esp. in their live shows “fully improvised with tunes inspired by the everyday lives of the people around them” as described by their record label Mint 400 Records which is surely the hippest entity to come outta of Hawthorne, New Jersey since a young woman named Debbie was reared there going from full-on hippie chick to new-wave queen after self-deporting to the Lower East Side…
…and not unlike Blondie in their heyday, Gardenia excel at painting evocative sonic portraits of urban denizens and their everyday lives, including those aspiring to some level of fame and/or celebrity whether “Lana Del Rey” (their immediately preceding single) or the aforementioned “Alexa” with both songs being more “about how people idolize celebrities in such strange ways” then the celebs themselves, whether big or small or pretend and all the contradictions arising from our celebrity culture like how LDR “represents how beautiful Americana can be even when America is not” or how Alexa is seemingly both an influencer and out of touch, a self-deemed celebrity known to almost no one…
…the latter of whom being no less attractive to Ryan’s ex-roommate for it (maybe more so cuz of it) which we don’t intend to be condescending in pointing out (and neither do Gardenia, obviously) cuz let’s face it most of us have a little of Ryan’s roommate in us or have at one time (eww, not like that!) when it comes to fixations on the kind of person who’s never all there even when they’re there (not for you, anyway) but who never quite leave your head even when they leave the room which is maybe what leads Ryan to sing, “I miss you, Alexa, when I see you tonight…”
…in a song that starts off sounding a bit disinterested but then ends up at the other extreme as the song moves from hushed vocal delivery and muted strings and throbbing tom-toms and lullaby-like melodies to a full-on heart-on-sleeve inspirational rager complete with soaring vocals and crashing cymbals and brass fanfares and a melody that ascends up to the heavens like Gardenia’s suddenly gone all early all early Arcade Fire on us expertly ebbing and flowing in a manner that captures the ricocheting internal turmoil inherent in being drawn to someone or some thing you well know is bad for you but still serves as your own personal Alexa or Jesus or Idaho…
…which not to get to all Freudian about it but could be as much down to what you yourself project upon the person or the object or the idea in question that serves as your own personal Alexa as it does to any quality inherent to the real “Alexa” if such an entity even exists which is exactly what C-list influencers depend upon unsuspecting people doing to help push their status up to a C-plus level influencer like an airline service agent checking your psychic baggage at the gate…
…with examples of just these sorts of mental mechanisms strewn across the lyrics of “I Miss You, Alexa” with the Ego guarding against the Id by framing aspects of the latter in negative terms, denied and disowned thru projecting these negative qualities onto Others, like where Ryan observes how “these city nights can make you feel so cold / pretty people all around me and they’re drinking alone / and its gets me” with the pretty people in question possibly being projections of his own multiple Selves that’re appealing taken on their own but troublesome when taken together where they don’t seem to integrate or cohere very well into a singular ego-identity…
…or the lines later in the song where Ryan astutely observes how Alexa likes to comb the local bar scene for dudes who “got no ambition but play the guitar / just like me” with Alexa clearly able to project whatever she wants to onto these hapless hipster type figures, in the process piecing together the idealized script of the self-made biopic and then to “project” or to “manifest” it into real life that if if you can get enough people to buy into the narratives you’re pushing which is something we almost all do if we’re being honest which makes the song highly relatable and goes to show how useful psychology can be to lyrical analysis not that we’d ever project our own agendas or interests onto someone else’s creative labor…
…of if you prefer spirituality to psychology the Tibetan Hindus have a perfect word for what we’re talking about here and that’s tulpa, a terms they use to describe sentient being conjured into existence thru sheer mind power as a sort of self-made döppleganger formed from that little-or-not-so-little bit of psychic overhang hanging off the end of your sentient being projected into it’s own distinct reality so as you can see how tulpas are all about creating your own personal Alexas and the narratives needed to sustain ‘em or as the Upanishads put it: ““We’re like the dreamer who dreams and lives insides the dream”…
…so there you have it and let us end this writeup with some straight-up, cut-and-dried facts just to prove that such things do still exist and still matter with Gardenia generously letting us know the following re: “I Miss You, Alexa”: The song was mixed/mastered by Jack Shirley (Jeff Rosenstock, Deafheaven), and recorded with DJ O’Loane (Awksymoron) at Heavy Meadow Studios in Williamsburg. This is our first “quiet” song, and arguably our most upbeat one despite the lyrics. We don’t think this song is going to be our new sound by any means, but it is a very meaningful one-off to us. The song is out now on Mint 400 Records, and our last single ‘Lana Del Rey’ got featured in press such as EARMILK, New Noise Magazine, and Under the Radar.
