Alex The Astronaut: ‘The Best Songs Don’t Have An Answer’

Australian singer-songwriter Alex The Astronaut is a private person, especially when it comes to their songwriting process. The idea of letting others into your work, contributing words and melodies, seeing out the raw demos, hearing the multiple takes of a hook and witnessing the song take form from birth to completion is an incredibly vulnerable experience. But on her new EP RAGE AND ALL ITS FRIENDS, Alex’s first leap into collaboration helped create one of her most metamorphic projects yet.

The six-track EP took shape from a collection of 37 songs written over the course of two years: some made during Troye Sivan’s World Pride writing camp in 2023, others made in the privacy of Alex’s own space. According to Alex, it was a “kind of weird” process, but ultimately, the story that she wanted to share organically revealed itself as time went on.

“37 got trimmed to 20, 20 got trimmed to 15 – I think we were looking for the songs that we all liked the most because they were all from the same time period, and they all added up because they're about me and my feelings,” she told The Music.

“I really liked the word ‘rage’, I thought that was a funny word. And as songs were released, I thought maybe they were all friends with each other. [The songs are like] the different aspects of grief,”

“I think the point of it kind of being an EP and I guess how we did it was that it was a work in progress. There was no definitive process which is how most of my albums work. I follow the theory of absolutely nothing which means I know nothing. It's very tempting for me when I write music to come out with an answer on the other side. And I think the best songs don't have an answer. They just kind of stick with the feeling.”

Sticking with the feeling has been a gradual process for Alex both in music and in life. So much so, that it’s caused her to reevaluate what constitutes “healthy healing”. Naturally, music has helped her overcome and oversee thoughts and feelings more neutrally or positively, but sometimes life gets you down on your luck so hard, that all you can do in that moment is rage. One of the more literal examples of this on the project is the upbeat, guitar-driven track Road Rage. Feeling frustrated after the COVID pandemic, Alex found herself taking her anger and frustration out on bad drivers on the road. A common and shared feeling for many people behind the wheel, the song speaks to a level of self-awareness Alex gained during this time, looking to meet frustrating situations with humour and understanding.

“I've never really thought of myself as a rage person,” she said. “But I think that's why it was also funny to me. I was so cranky with the world and how everything was, how everything's going. Road Rage is about not dealing with that in a good way,” she said.

“With that song, I was noticing I was just getting so caught up in these traffic stories. They’re such boring stories to tell. And I was like, what's going on? Who cares, you know? I think I was in the middle of writing lots of songs and was like, fuck it, I'm going to write a song about road rage,”

“And I think I noticed that I have all of these feelings inside, and even if you're not doing anything about them outside of your head, they're still there, you still have to deal with them. So I was taking myself for little mental health walks, doing all that. And that was my healthy way of dealing with it. But I think the thing that I was discovering was that even if you’re a passive person, you can still have all these feelings jammed up inside you. And you got to do something about them. Songwriting definitely helps. It didn’t fix the whole thing, but it helped.”

RAGE AND ALL ITS FRIENDS presents itself as an opportunity to see Alex outside of the person her fans have gotten to know her for. It’s a shot in the dark, a boisterous display of quirkiness that shows a side of her outside of the “wholesome”. The journey has helped Alex heal from the fear of needing to hide or change herself to be palatable. This EP is Alex at her purest and rawest.

“I think there are parts of my personality that maybe haven’t been in my music. My band and close friends always say that people get really confused when they meet me because my music has been so wholesome. So, it was nice to be able to show a bit more of how my brain works and how I think. I guess that heals me because of not having to feel like I'm hiding a bit of myself or being wholesome or something. I guess I wanted to show that I'm very, very imperfect and very much still working it out,”

“Not Worth Hiding I wrote when I was 21 and I thought I knew everything. And so showing my personality and releasing songs and having people like them, is like, oh cool, people like that imperfection, and that's comforting to me. I try to write songs all the time and any time I spend doing that is good for me.”

The writing and music-making duties were shared on RAGE AND ALL ITS FRIENDS, with Alex collaborating with music heavy hitters like Paul Kelly, Lisa Mitchell and Benjamin Francis Leftwich to tie the EP together. While the concept of working with others felt alien to Alex at first, it was soon revealed to be one of the most incredible creative experiences she has ever shared with other artists.

“Usually, I hate doing co-writes. I’m just not very good at sitting in the feelings with other people there who I maybe don't know that well. I like to do that on my own, but I thought, okay, we need to just try new things sometimes. That's good for you. And so with Paul Kelly, we spent two days just writing. I think we did three or four songs and it was so cool to see someone who's been writing songs for like 50 years take so much time with it and treat it with so much respect and patience.

I'm definitely someone that can sometimes rush through, whereas he was really slow and steady and careful with it, making sure the story made sense and all of that. And that was just amazing because I learned to write from listening to his songs and listening to how he phrases stuff and how he paces the stories and so to get to see him doing it in real time was just like, whoa, you're a genius,”

“I did my first ever tour with Lisa Mitchell. So she's always been like my big sister music person. And I had this song and I sent it to her and she just added some levity to it. Sometimes those things just work – you can sit in the studio for hours and one person has one thought and that's the thing that makes the song,”

“With Benjamin Francis Leftwich, who is someone that I listened to when I was in school and love his music, Chochi who was in Gang of Youths messaged me just between Christmas and New Years last year asking if I want to do a songwriting session with him. And I was like, absolutely. And so we wrote a song, it was kind of a lowkey one. I kind of thought that was going to be it when it made the last round, and then I texted him when it was one of the top songs in the end,”

“It’s just funny how it works,  they all had different stories, which is cool now because I go back to them and don't know the words and then learn them again. And then I'm like, oh cool, that was when I wrote that with that person. So it felt very social and community-like, whereas usually it's just me and my brain in a dark corner of the world.”

The journey of creating RAGE AND ALL ITS FRIENDS is a symbol of vulnerability, new beginnings and healing. It catapulted an earnest push for self-discovery and self-awareness in Alex, who hopes that her transparency and drive to constantly be better, do better and feel better, inspire those who may be feeling idle in their view of the world.

“You don't have to be perfect in processing your emotions,” she said.

“Sometimes these big, big emotions can be funny and they can be there in times that you didn't realise they would. I think that things can happen in tiny moments that are a really big deal, and it's cool to be able to sit back and go, I'm really struggling with how complicated the world is. You don't have to have a solution for anything. Emotions are enough for a song,”

RAGE AND ALL ITS FRIENDS by Alex The Astronaut is available to listen to on all streaming platforms now.