ALEX LAHEY – GOOD TIME NORTH AMERICAN TOUR

“Living in a world that wasn’t made for you makes you pretty strong and adaptive, and you find the fun in it,” says Alex Lahey. “It also makes you realize how absurd everything is. With ‘The Answer Is Always Yes,’ I wanted to get weird because the world is weird, and it’s even weirder when you realize you don’t fit into it all the time.”

It’s no secret that the world wasn’t built with most people in mind. For those who exist on the fringe, you learn to pave your own way, foster your own community, and create your own joy. As a queer person and a daughter of migrants, Lahey learned how to adapt to a world that wasn’t made for her, and her third album, The Answer Is Always Yes, examines how she finds comfort in the discomfort, whether it’s reveling in absurdity or turning towards exploration.

Lahey’s debut album I Love You Like a Brother and its 2019 follow-up The Best of Luck Club take their focus from the lens of relationships, but with The Answer Is Always Yes, Lahey analyzes her otherness through different lenses, from its isolating effect to the surrealism and humor it instills.

“Congratulations” is about the strange experience of having two exes get married separately in a short time span, “The Sky Is Melting” revels in the chaos of consuming too many weed gummies, and the title track jokes about the immortality complex of hybrid drivers. Lahey also delves into intense experiences on tracks like “Permanent,” which juxtaposes the accelerating gentrification of her native Melbourne with the regression she felt while living in her childhood home during the pandemic, or “They Wouldn’t Let Me In,” Lahey’s first song mining the depths of her queer teenage years.

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Indie rock sensation Liza Anne discovered songwriting as a young girl at summer camp, during a guitar lesson workshop. Inspired, from that moment forward she added melodies for her poetry and prose. As a teenager, she followed the thread of her love for music from quiet Saint Simons Island, GA, where she was raised, to Nashville to attend Belmont University, during which time she self-released two albums that now boast over
50 million streams. In 2018, her sound and talents came to maturity with groundbreaking Fine But Dying. Liza Anne’s songwriting reached its zenith thus far with lyrics that reckoned starkly with womanhood and mental health. It was wry, sensitive, vulnerable and resolute. For two years she toured the record, and experienced highs and lows that inspired her to slow down for the first time. She captivated and fascinated crowds while opening for Kacey Musgraves, making her television debut on Conan, playing at Paramore’s Art + Friends Festival, Shaky Knees Festival, and sold-out venues across the U.S. and Europe. She also ended an intensive relationship, spent time in therapy and meditated on who she wanted to see in the mirror moving forward.

After reflecting on these events, she penned a collection of songs about the ideal self-love she wanted to achieve, messages to herself that she needed to hear, which became Bad Vacation. Produced by Micah Tawlks (Louis Prince, COIN) and Kyle Ryan
(Kacey Musgraves, Natalie Prass) and co-produced by Liza Anne [with the exception to the first singles “Devotion” and “Desire” that were produced by Justin Meldal-Johnsen (M83, Beck)], arrangements are poised and fierce to match, fueled by muscular guitar hooks, retro synthesizers, and insightful lyrics. It’s Liza Anne at her most confident– both polished and punk rock, evoking St. Vincent’s raw power, Kate Bush’s tender theatricality and Talking Heads’ high energy. It was released in 2020 during the pandemic, and received much critical acclaim from outlets such as NPR, Stereogum and Paper Magazine. Though live shows had to take a backseat to the lockdown and
the record never made its live debut, Liza Anne made the most of the time off from touring during the past two years to write and record another album. [Now, she will finally perform Bad Vacation live and preview songs from her upcoming record. On this tour, over 14 nights at select venues with a specially curated roster of guests, fans will get an opportunity to hear the album that taught Liza Anne to love herself and self-prophesied her into the woman she is today, in full, in an intimate setting that’s only fitting for such material.