Written By: Codi Farmer
Hailing from the dirty streets of Eugene is a new artist that the world didn’t know we needed. An ethereal blend of indie rock, shoe gaze, post-rock, and folk-style singer-songwriting that boasts grandiose emotions with an addicting voice that will be stuck in your mind for months to come. This is 22-year-old Alex Podesta, or “Podesta,” to his listeners.
Podesta grew up near San Fransisco and never quite knew what he wanted to do in the future. All he knew was that he loved music and performing with a heavy gravitation toward the dramatics. His first instrument was a toy keyboard clanging on the plastic keys until his mother decided it was time to get him started on a real piano in elementary school. In middle school he began playing the clarinet in his school band, eventually moving up to his high school orchestra.
Toward the end of his high school career, he realized that music could be more than just a school project. It was in orchestra class that Podesta realized his self-proclaimed musical ear translated over to having a good singing voice.
After graduating high school, Podesta decided to take a gap year before attending the University of Oregon to study music. During this was when he began to get more serious about making music and he quickly realized that this was his passion. “I wanna keep making music,” Podesta said. “I kinda wanna be a rockstar, just go all the way. This is what I wanna do. I wanna perform and I wanna create.”
Going into college, Podesta had fragments of song ideas he began during his gap year and with these, he began working on his debut album “Until Something Changes,” which was released on all streaming platforms in June of 2022. This album took about three years to come to fruition fully and draws inspiration from a number of notable artists. He says some of his biggest musical influences during his time as an artist have been Pheobe Bridgers, Bjork, Mitski, the Velvet Underground, My Bloody Valentine, Songs Ohia, Big Thief, and their front-woman Adrianne Lenker, who he notes as his largest inspiration musically. “I drew inspiration from so many places and I feel like so many bands try to stick with just one style, but I [had] so many influences that went into my album,” he said.
This, Podesta continues on, poses a concern for the budding artists' future projects – how much experimentation and blending of influences is considered too much; how far outside the box is too far?
One particularly interesting note about his influences, though, is that many of them began as just artists that he felt like he was forced to listen to (by himself, of course). “I would force myself to listen to all these acclaimed albums until they clicked and it just felt like it unlocked my brain to a new world of music,” Podesta said he would make himself listen to a broad range of music until he understood the artistry behind them. Podesta continued, “The first time I listened to Nico and the Velvet Underground, I thought ‘What the hell is this’?”
The creation of his album itself was a very natural and raw progression. He began with snippets of ideas from his more adolescent years that he began to piece together. He had been using digital audio workspaces to mess around with amateur audio production while he was in middle and high school, but once beginning college he started taking classes in the field to further his abilities in production. He recorded his entire album himself in practice spaces on campus and used MIDI’s for the bass and drums on his songs. Finally, after recording all of the pieces, he sent his songs away to be mixed and mastered by a professional in the field, and after three long years, “Until Something Changes” became real.
Despite being a perfectionist, Podesta still had some help along the way. However, instead of creative input on his work, the help he received was far more valuable – support from his friends and family. “My parents are the most supportive people for me,” he said. “I feel so lucky and grateful that they support me in whatever way I need and they’ve allowed me to spend all my extra time to be able to create my work.” He felt as though he wouldn’t be in the position he is in right now as an artist if it wasn’t for their unconditional support of his craft. In addition to his parents, Podesta also noted his amazing best friends who always stand by his side. Six of his closest friends even made an eight-hour trek to watch him perform in Seattle back in February.
In his career so far, Podesta has two shows under his belt. His first was an intimate backyard gig where he performed the full album and a number of covers for a select audience back in June, which I was lucky enough to attend myself (his incredible cover of “Anything” by Adrianne Lenker still haunts my memory nearly a year later). His second gig was the MoPOP 2023 Sound Off, featuring 11 other select artists back in March. “I got to be dramatic and let loose,” Podesta said. “I got to show the audience how the music makes me feel and how it feels in my head through my body and my voice.”
Podesta had his first paid bar gig on May 10th at Max’s Tavern with some other local independent musicians. He described the show to be a fun and low-pressure performance that was exciting since he was able to play new covers as well as some of his original songs acoustically. Additionally, he will be playing at the Folk Life Festival in Seattle on Memorial Day weekend, which will be his first festival show. “I wanna have more music to play live,” Podesta said. “So I’m really itching to write more. I just have a lot of things I need to work on first before I can do that.”
He hopes to break more into the local music scene here in Eugene but finds it a bit difficult given the nature of the scene. “I feel like kind of an outlier in the Eugene music scene because most people who play at house shows are full bands and are far more upbeat, which is different than what I put out,” he said. “I just need to figure out how to make my music more performable for a wider audience.”
He is currently working on forming a band based out of Eugene to play his music and is still looking for a few additional members.
After listening to the 48 minutes of artistry currently available for the public, listeners must wonder if they can expect more work from Podesta in the coming future. Rest assured, loyal fans, he does have more songs coming. He currently has about ten tracks he’s working on and hopes to release in the near future, though he doesn’t have a release date set in mind yet. “I need to give myself time to actually finish it,” he says. “I need to go at a steady pace and not rush myself to finish something.”
He stated that his only regret with his first album is that he put himself on a strict time schedule to release the songs before his sophomore year ended. “I need to make more earworms, create songs that get stuck in your head,” he said. “I want to balance being more pop with furthering my own experimentation within my music. I just want to push more of myself into it.”
Follow him on Instagram @podestaaa
Listen to the album here:
https://open.spotify.com/album/71xrMs3cFlg8WvdQ97WMXF?si=Xw08Ku6fRcSIWj5JZQDjzQ