Alex Amor: Speaking Her Own Love Language

Alex Amor has been blessed by the music gods. That’s what she tells me when we met over Zoom on another hot day in July. Both of us sit in our respective flats, she with her make-up done, blonde hair swept back, and me, my face a tad unshaven, in the wake of a weekend full of music. I’ve just returned from Latitude Festival, whilst Alex, on the same weekend, saw Haim at the 02. The night before our chat, she saw Phoebe Bridgers at the Brixton Academy, a gig where a chance encounter with Matt Healy left her slightly starstruck. “Are you good with meeting famous people?” She asks me. “I’m relatively good, I think,” I reply. “What was Matt Healey like?”

“He was really lovely,” she replies. “And chill, I think, all I said was, ‘Phoebe Bridgers fan?’ which, of course, he clearly was. And then he went on stage with her!” She goes quiet. Obviously, something about the Haim and Phoebe Bridgers gig has inspired her. It’s evident by how she talks about her music. Constantly her gaze flashes up to an empty corner behind the laptop camera as if a new idea has occurred to her. Eventually, she says, “I’m going to aspire to that level of fandom [regarding Phoebe Bridgers]. Every single person knew every single lyric. Most of the time, you couldn’t even hear her. It was feral, it was crazy. I describe her fans as a cult. Haim too… are inspiring a lot of my new music,” she tells me next, brushing a strand of hair off her nose. “Just the sound, the upbeat nature of it, the textures of the music and the rhythmical guitars are something I’m experimenting with for the record after ‘The Art of Letting Go’.”

Hold on, we need to pull back here. Already Alex is envisioning the sounds of future releases. We haven’t even touched on ‘The Art of Letting Go’, yet. Maybe I should tell you a bit about Alex. You may know Alex already from her 2021 EP, ‘Love Language’. Maybe you know her from her recent single, ‘Bad Tattoo’, which was reviewed by Yuck earlier in the year and marks a new era for Alex, the first example of her collaboration with Karma Kid, Mack Jamieson, and Gianluca Buccelati.

Amor, herself, has been working toward pop superstardom for a while now, though she’s taken a somewhat circuitous route. Already an accomplished flautist, Alex has written music from a young age, but took something of a detour at the end of her teens to pursue a brief education in textile design. Like many students compelled to make big decisions about their future at an age where the opportunities are almost too vast, Alex soon decided a career in music was something for which she was destined. This is when she returned to music, which brings us to her recent EP, ‘The Art of Letting Go’.

“Music has always been the thing that never wavered, the thing I’m relentlessly obsessed with,” she tells me. “I’ve always been a very creative person, that’s just in my D.N.A. When I was younger I wasn’t playing with dolls, I was just making things at the kitchen table… then when I was twelve, thirteen, I couldn’t really be bothered talking to anyone in the morning at school. I was a grumpy teenager. My mum would drop me off early at school and I would go to the music rooms and just write. As an angsty teenager with a lot of emotion, I didn’t know where to put it, so I just put in my songs.”

““Being open to the unknown… having good faith it will work out. I was fortunate in meeting a few select people in London… I’m a firm believer in manifestation and if you want something hard enough… I just trusted it would work out””

So, if she was always writing music, why didn’t she study music at university? “I thought it [textiles] was what I wanted to do. I kind of always knew music was what I needed to do, but it would take a lot of work. ‘Cause I’m not naturally gifted. I knew I’d have to work at it.” Which is what Alex did. In her third year of uni, single, and newly charged to pursue a career in music, she began writing songs again. Fast forward a few years, though, and she’s working with Karma Kid. Isn’t that something of a leap? What changed? Well, first she moved to London. Then she started networking. “Being open to the unknown… having good faith it will work out. I was fortunate in meeting a few select people in London… I’m a firm believer in manifestation and if you want something hard enough… I just trusted it would work out,” she explains.

Here, I start to believe Alex might be too modest. Manifestation and divine intervention are all well and good, and indeed, a celestial hand might be guiding Alex’s career, but you don’t have to talk long with Alex to realise she is a hard worker. This, along with her high energy, and her ability to constantly summon ideas and discover inspiration, must contribute in some way to her various successes. Take, for example, the creative isolation she enforced on herself prior to the government-mandated lockdowns of 2020. No divine entity could make her do that. This sort of diligence is just part of her character. “I just knew I had so much work to do with music,” she says. “That to concentrate on it I had to strip everything out of my life. That is the only way I could hyperfocus on the music. I thought, ‘what if, for two months I just do music and nothing else?’”

During this period, Alex downloaded Vampr – an app you could describe as Tinder for musicians, though the relationships formed are purely professional. On Vampr, Alex met a few musicians and started working remotely, finally producing an album at the end of her period of isolation. If only she knew what was to come… It seems almost prescient that, prior to the pandemic, Alex had discovered a way to work with people all over the world in an environment which would come to resemble that which, over two years, we were all forced to inhabit at one time or another. The album she made during this period was not released, but the experience was, nevertheless, essential in getting to grips with the process of songwriting.

Duly, however, Alex was locked down, like everyone else. I wondered, initially, whether the title, ‘The Art of Letting Go’, might be some reference to the catharsis of leaving lockdown. To this, she responds. “I think, when you’re kind of left to yourself in a room with no distractions you kind of have to look at yourself and the things you’re holding on to. It was more, within myself, the things I had to let go of, whether past relationships, things that were holding me back, or situations that weren’t serving me anymore. Being able to let go of that, and exploring that in a romantic sense… it’s a broad topic which everyone has to go through.”

“ “I think as humans we have a tendency to go ‘oh, I had a good time’, then forget about it, but, maybe to protect ourselves from the bad thing ever happening again, we find it hard to forget””

‘Bad Tattoo’, the recent release from ‘The Art of Letting Go’, embodies this idea completely. The idea of an ex-partner lingering, with all the positive and negative memories you have of them jostling for prime position, is encapsulated in the tattoo metaphor. Alex came up with the lyric, however, in a somewhat strange manner. “Have you ever watched the film, It: Chapter 2?” She asks me. “I have,” I say, then hesitate. “The one with the clown?” She nods. I can’t see where this is going. Did the children get matching tattoos? Was there a mistranslated Asian character or sucky panther somewhere on Pennywise’s back? No. Alex explains: “I was watching that and this kid was doing a speech… at a funeral, and he said something along the lines of ‘why is it impossible to forget bad memories, but really easy to forget the good ones’. So, I paused the movie, wrote that down, and then wrote all the lyrics to ‘Bad Tattoo’… I think as humans we have a tendency to go ‘oh, I had a good time’, then forget about it, but, maybe to protect ourselves from the bad thing ever happening again, we find it hard to forget.”

Such sentiments will resonate with anybody fresh out of a relationship, which will satisfy Alex. Her music finds fans, generally, in those who appreciate a song’s lyrical content. For Alex, a song’s lyrics are its cornerstone. Constantly she is writing, coming up with ideas, and arriving at recording sessions with pages of notes on her iPhone so that when the track is laid down, she can find the appropriate sentiment to match its spirit. This, I imagine, is how the Haim sisters, or Phoebe Bridgers, work too.

Those acts Alex formerly mentioned as inspiring, owe their success, in part, to the recognition by their fans of the sentiments in their songs. The opening lines to Bridgers’ ‘Motion Sickness’, “I hate you for what you did / and I miss you like a little kid” reflect the ideas contained in Amor’s ‘Bad Tattoo’, referring to the mental struggle; the battle between positive and negative memories which takes place post-breakup.

As for Alex, what next? Where does she see her music going? Where will the celestial hand guide her? “Thinking big-big… People coming to shows, and everybody knowing every lyric, that’s the most beautiful thing. It started happening to me, when I play shows at festivals, I see people mouthing the lyrics. Generally, for more people to stream my music… and having a strong connection with my fans… music brings people together, and that’s what I love about music the most.”