Shane Alexander Sought Timeless Tone for Mono Solo

Written by Chrissy Mauck

Long before discovering that writing songs served as a cathartic exercise for dealing with life's ups and downs, folk rock musician Shane Alexander found escape from an unstable childhood by listening to songs.

"Without going too deeply into my personal situation, my dad was married a number of times so there was a lot of weirdness from the time I was quite young-just sort of unsteadiness," reflects Alexander. "It wasn't particularly bad or anything; just a lot of changes and stuff. My respite was staying at my grandmother's house and playing all of these vinyl LPs that were my dad's."

Spinning those LPs by the Beatles, the Moody Blues, Cats Stevens and Simon & Garfunkel moved and inspired a young and impressionable Alexander.

"I'll still hear Simon & Garfunkel's 'The Boxer' and get chills from head to foot because I remember the low brass and the giant alto at the end of 'The Boxer,' he says. "Musically, it just blew my mind. The instrumental apart alone was just like, 'holy crap.'"

Understanding this rich landscape of sonic influences helps explain this tweet we came across from Alexander during the 2010  South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas: "I changed strings pre-SXSW and HATED my tone the whole time."

For an artist trying to create his own brand of evocative music, guitar tone is paramount.

"For me, it's an endless quest trying to find exactly what I hear in my head — something timeless," he explains. Which is why he used "crusty, crusty strings" on his latest solo effort, Mono Solo.

"I really find that old strings have so much character," he continues. "I just don't like new-sounding strings. On an electric guitar, it's not that big of a deal, but on an acoustic guitar, around six months to a year is where I feel like they finally start to settle down and it just sounds like a nice, woody instrument with character."

When it comes to an instrument with character, Alexander need look no further than his trusty "tank of an acoustic guitar" — a Guild D55.

"I've rocked it for many moons," he says of his warm-sounding acoustic. "It always shines in the studio. It mics up really well; has a really even strum. It's very sympathetic - I use a lot of tunings, and a lot of guitars aren't happy when you tune them 19 million ways, but that guitar is always good to go."

Alexander, who has opened for Jewel and Seal armed only with an acoustic guitar,  indulges his "first love" on the new album with two short instrumental tracks that he refers to as "musical palate cleansers."

Mono Solo's title track is an ethereal melody that highlights Alexander's slide guitar work, while the Middle Eastern-infused "Vegeta" shows off his fingerpicking chops.

"I wrote 'Vegeta' probably a week before I went into the studio, and I wrote it exactly as it's recorded," shares Alexander. "I thought, 'This is an odd little duck but it's really cool.' I liked the idea of sort of anything goes. A lot of Beatles' records — there would be strange things and surprises around every corner. I like that about this record. I think it's a good ride."

"Miles for Days," the album's melancholic-yet-rocking opening track speaks directly to Alexander's road travels. Born out of a late-night drive across Texas while Lucinda Williams album West blared through the speakers, the song has been described as an "upbeat ode to depression," which is the perhaps the perfect paradox about touring.

"I was driving and this lyric 'miles for days, days for miles, no one knows' popped in my head, because no one knows what it's really like to be on the road," says Alexander. "I love touring but for a moment there, you think, 'This tour is a monumental task.' It's always a superhuman feat of strength to get through one. So I just sort of wrote about that experience of 'here comes the blue.' I felt myself for a minute slipping into the darkness in the corners of my mind. I just indulged that and when I got to where I was going I wrote that guitar riff." 

Citing Neil Young as his biggest songwriting influence, Alexander frequently mines his album lyrics from personal journeys.

"I've always dealt with everything in my life by writing about it — that's how I'm sort of able to move on and keep my head up," says Alexander, who also hopes that at the end of his days, his catalog of albums will help document where he was in life."

Unfortunately, the life experiences on his new album reflect themes of loss and instability.

"The songs sort of wrote themselves and as I look back on this body of work from this period, there's a lot of deep, real stuff," he says.

For instance, while touring for 2008's The Sky Below, Alexander observed firsthand the widespread fallout from the economic freefall. 

"I saw a lot of people who were quite successful lose their fortunes; a lot of people who had good jobs lose their jobs and a lot of people who had stable home lives lose their marriages," he says. "I just saw a lot of this tumultuousness out there. A lot of people I had seen on previous tours who were fat and happy all of a sudden were sort of desperate and that was really hard to see. That was definitely in the back of my head while writing this, having seen a lot of people that I actually know and care about suffering."

Though Alexander acknowledges the suffering, he doesn't dwell on despair. Instead he pens tracks like "Never Knew the Sunshine," a folk ballad that reverently focuses on life's silver lining.

"I just tried to put a positive spin on life's ups and downs and just know that no matter how bad things get, there's always another chance to turn them around," says Alexander. "It was a very simple sentiment but sometimes you have to go through the really, really dark times to appreciate the good things. If things were always great, you wouldn't have the same appreciation. So having weathered the storms of the last few years, I wrote that song to try to put some positivity out there."

But channeling positive vibes is never more challenging than when confronting life's most ominous inevitability — mortality. "Corey's Song" is Alexander's farewell ode to one of his best friends, who was killed in a drunk driving accident. Alexander wrote the poetic tribute after returning home from the funeral in Pennsylvania, at which he served as a pallbearer.

"That in itself was a major experience," he says. "I'd been a pallbearer before for family members, but never for a young person. It was really a deep profound, terribly sad/beautiful experience. So I came home and I was writing this song, and I thought I had a real responsibility to have it not be morose in any way or a super downer."

Alexander delivered, and not just on "Corey's Song." Mono Solo in its entirety is an honest, reverent and hopeful album.

Catch him touring in support of his latest album this summer in the United States and Sweden. He'll also be touring the rest of Europe this fall.

Purchase Mono Solo on iTunes here.