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Dammien Alexander
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DAMMIEN ALEXANDER
For a man who typically speaks with precision and measured clarity, Dammien Alexander is not one to traffic in hyperbole. To that end, it’s startling to hear the musician and ever-churning creative mind so casually recall what he calls “a near-death experience.” “I heard this voice say, “Dude, we’re gonna die,” he remembers of a panicked 2012 surfing incident that occurred during a vacation in Costa Rica. The road-tested Canadian musician however is nothing if not the determined type. He’d been through the ringer before and emerged safely on the other side. And so, even as the wicked riptide worked against his body that day, even as he desperately tried to swim to safety not knowing the outcome, Alexander found an inner strength he didn’t know he possessed. “I don’t know how or why but a quickening happened in my mind,” he recalls, adrenaline still exuding from within. “I heard a voice say, “You’re not going anywhere. You just gotta figure this out!””
Alexander made it back to shore. “And after that something changed,” the multi-instrumentalist and singer says with a sense of pride and astonishment. “Everything changed.”
What might have caused others to recede into themselves was precisely the spark Alexander had been searching for. Only a few years prior he’d walked away from the music industry, feeling burnt out, fed up and lacking an overall sense of gratification. Suddenly however, following Costa Rica, the passion he’d long felt for his craft, for his guitar, for his desire to create a new style of music returned. A subsequent burst of inspiration found him blending his equal love of R&B, funk and soul with the raucous rock energy of his youth into thrilling new music. “It sounds really hippie-like,” the musician, who over the following years would perform around the globe and write and record Love + Infinity, his most impassioned, free-flowing and inspired album to date, says with a laugh. “But it opened me up quite significantly. And then I started playing again.”
“I just felt lighter as a person so the music started to resonate that way,” Alexander says by way of explanation for what prompted him to concoct a fiery 11-track album, due on March 24 via Underground Sun. The album swings in equal measure with funky, Prince-indebted horn licks (“Love With Our Souls”), minimalist vocal-and-guitar acrobatics (“Elevate”), and swampy blues (“Be Your Man”). “I started to make music that was more rhythmic and upbeat.”