July 27, 2024

by Ann Powers

Alex Izenberg, once a teenage guitar prodigy, has made personal and musical breakthroughs on his new album, Alex Izenberg & the Exiles. But the album also connects Izenberg to a lineage of musicians working through mental illness in their art.

Giraffe Studios

Dear riders of the cosmic waves,

I’ve had a bumpy journey the past couple of weeks. After four and a half years of what I thought was super immunity, COVID got me (probably at a show — consider this when you wonder whether to put a mask in your bag right now), hitting hard. I made it through! But the first five days I clung to my pillows in a wooze, subsisting on ginger ale mixed with limeade and watching Ingmar Bergman movies that suited my gloom. In this state I couldn’t read much, but I did scan the headlines (yikes!) and sift through the internet for music news.

Near the tail end of my convalescence I found a story that led me to a new album, one surprisingly compatible with my mind’s foggy atmosphere. Written by Grayson Haver Currin, an explorer-scribe who specializes in undersung heroes, it told of a former prodigy named Alex Izenberg, who’d almost attained typical 21st-century stardom — famous mentor (hitmaker Linda Perry), great tour slots (opening for Roger Daltrey) — until schizophrenia moored him in his grandparents’ house in a San Fernando Valley suburb. Therapy, meds and a shift in musical focus from classic rock to a woodsier, more contemporary sound has made Izenberg a modest indie success in his early 30s, an inspirational outcome for someone who once had trouble leaving bed before noon. Alex Izenberg & the Exiles is out this week after having been named one of Pitchfork’s most anticipated summer albums. It’s his first release with a full band after a series of intriguing, odd bedroom compositions. The new album is a door opener, its richer sound taking Izenberg beyond the realm of the eccentric. I’m happy that he’s leveled up. But what struck me while listening was the way Izenberg’s music had shifted as he found his balance. Living with mental illness, he’s made music that connected to a long legacy of other artists doing the same.

The songs on Alex Izenberg & the Exiles move within a watery glow, like little kelp forests in a salty inlet. With titles like “An Obscured Odyssey” and “Apophenia” (a medical term for the state of mind that gives rise to conspiracy theories), they openly, if metaphorically, address Izenberg’s experiences of mental unrest. According to Currin, this is a shift for Izenberg: Encouraged by his childhood friend and longtime collaborator Greg Hartunian, Izenberg tamped down his penchant for writing woeful songs of unrequited love in favor of lyrics that reflect both his sometimes distorted mindscapes and the wisdom of elders who had helped him escape his torments, like the Stoic philosophers and the Western Buddhist teacher Alan Watts. “I dreamt a stirring rhapsody, reading the book of changes,” Izenberg writes in “Pareidolia,” which reflects on the experience of having visions. In “Only the Moon Knows,” he sings of overcoming “the iron hand of death in a velvet glove” by “talking to the wind through the smoke,” evoking the process of confronting mental discomfort through therapy or spiritual practice. His elliptical words don’t clarify the struggles Izenberg has endured so much as allow the listener to fully imagine them.

That latter song also mentions a vehicle carrying Izenberg toward clarity: a wooden ship. As the music’s gentle current enfolds pedal steel, gentle horn parts and a loping California country rhythm, it’s impossible to not think of David Crosby, who co-wrote the hit 1969 song named for such vessels and released his own document of inner torment, If I Could Only Remember My Name, in 1971. Alex Izenberg & the Exiles abounds with such veiled tributes. Its arrangements recall the cosmic beauty of I Am the Cosmos, the one solo album by Chris Bell, the tragic co-founder of Memphis cult heroes Big Star, while the mix (by noted engineer and producer Phil Ek) points toward The Madcap Laughs, by the asylum-bound Pink Floyd co-founder Syd Barrett. Izenberg’s wonderfully dreamy vocals strike me as a gruffer take on the legacy of lost ‘90s hero Elliott Smith, and the composer himself has said he was inspired by Fleet Foxes’ album Crack-Up, a sonic take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1945 account of his psychological struggles, which bears that name.

These connections reinforce one of the special qualities of Izenberg’s music: While most of his predecessors made their works informed by madness while in the thick of it, he is able to approach the subject with the clarity of someone who has learned to cope and process his suffering. This album doesn’t fully rest on the other side of visions and delusions, necessarily – it’s very hazy, in the style of other contemporary pastoral psychedelia, like The War on Drugs or Hiss Golden Messenger. But somehow the songs project a kind of awareness, not only in their gnomic lyrics, but through recognizable musical touchstones. The many Los Angeles musicians who gathered to help Izenberg create this opus surely know of the history the work proudly joins. Its inviting referentiality begs a question: Is there, now, at least within indie rock, a sound that defines music about mental illness and spiritual breakthrough? Could we perhaps name this subgenre … psychodrama rock?

I’m torn about this question. There’s no doubt that a lineage exists — I’ve already offered highlights that most rock fans of a certain age know well, and it can be augmented by similar examples. Nick Drake’s delicate odes, exquisitely orchestrated by Robert Kirby, connect to the much rawer yet equally romantic ballads of cassette-tape auteur Daniel Johnston. Of Montreal’s 2008 masterpiece Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? shows that the mood of these recordings can encompass the experience of mania by enlisting synth-pop. Beloved songwriters like Jason Molina and Frightened Rabbit’s Scott Hutchison (both lost to suicide) remained within the sound’s general parameters while pushing the edges of vulnerability. While each of these artists expressed their own truths and often exquisitely captured the feeling of isolation that afflicts the psychically troubled, their albums do speak to each other across time and space. In this one corner of popular music, mental illness expresses itself through a blend of poeticized confessionalism and expansive psychedelia. The sound of psychodrama rock is paradoxically unsettled and inviting, pastoral, but with a storm in the background.

Yet when I consider pop’s larger spectrum, I find myself answering my question in the negative. Listen beyond the category of white men inspired by “Strawberry Fields Forever,” and the subject of mental health proves inspirational to nearly every kind of songmaker. Start with the blues, that fundamental American art form: Is there anything more harrowing than Robert Johnson singing “Hellhound on My Trail”? Yes, in fact, and we can go to jazz for it — Billie Holiday’s own account of major depression, “Gloomy Sunday.” Heavy metal turned mental breakdowns epic; classic country linked it to the horrors of alcoholism; soul stars like Marvin Gaye and Bill Withers approached it with a light touch that was never less than deeply serious. And then there’s Dory Previn, the unique singer-songwriter who endured a breakdown and wrote about it from her hospital room on the incredible On My Way To Where. I could go on and on, because every genre has its examples. Even disco! That is, if you buy my reading of my favorite Chic song: “At Last I Am Free,” a song about loneliness so deep it carries its bearer into a state of dissociation.

Today the public conversation about mental health is more robust than ever, and psychology’s lexicon has become part of daily parlance, in part due to the common experience of therapy, especially among young people. A quick survey of the current Hot 100 reveals myriad takes on the subject. There’s “I Am Not Okay” by Jelly Roll, whose admirable openness about his fight to overcome addiction and inherited depression is a central part of his persona and a key to his appeal as a purveyor of therapeutic country soul in the era of the opioid crisis. SZA’s enduring “Saturn” conjures the scattered mood of anxiety; “Intrusive thoughts, they paralyze,” she sings. Hot 100 mainstay Noah Kahan earned his devoted following in part by being open about his mania and depression in songs like “Growing Sideways,” and has established a foundation, The Busyhead Project, to further reduce stigma around mental health. Billie Eilish may have moved toward happier subjects on her current album Hit Me Hard and Soft, with appetite-driven love songs like “Lunch,” but she remains an avatar of the multiply-diagnosed Gen Zer. She opened that album with “Skinny,” which both confesses and assures: “The old me is still me and maybe the real me,” she sighs, pointing back to a time when her hits bore titles like “idontwannabeyouanymore.”

Then there’s hip-hop, which has taken up the subject of suicidal thoughts, manic behavior and addiction since its beginning, when Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five turned don’t push me, ‘cos I’m close to the edge into a rallying cry in 1982. From Biggie’s confrontations with ideation to Kendrick’s descriptions of ADHD, rappers have testified to the ways in which racism and poverty exacerbate psychic pain for many. There’s no one sound linking these inquiries — Kid Cudi’s Man in the Moon and Dave’s aptly named Psychodrama are both meticulous accounts of hitting bottom psychically and striving for recovery, but Cudi’s spacious and spaced-out song suites are very different than Dave’s ruminative yet neat confessions. Thematic lines connect Geto Boys’ definitive “Mind Playing Tricks on Me” across time to the recessive, addled outpourings of lost souls Lil Peep and XXXTentacion and their heirs, like Yeat, but their vocal styles couldn’t be more different.

Still, considering the younger rappers who make inner alienation and its material manifestations, I have begun to see a way to describe psychodrama rap, too. Cult favorites like Yeat and (the often very offensive) $uicideboy$ love to invoke the literary-cinematic genres that have long linked inner chaos to real-world mayhem: science fiction and horror. While guitar strummers like Izenberg color their hallucinatory tales in the same earth tones and pastels their heroes used, these rappers are drawn to the territories where Afro-Futurist writers like N.K. Jemison and Samuel R. Delany also find inspiration: coming dystopias and distant galaxies. If the psychodrama rock of Alex Izenberg and others comfort and illuminate within mystical landscapes, it’s hip-hop that envisions a picture of our inner lives that’s as big as outer space.

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Here are some other things that helped me through my recent rough times:

-- If you want to know more about Dory Previn’s remarkable career — and you should, it’s a rip-roaring saga — keep your eye out for this new documentary directed by Julia Greenberg and Dianna Dilworth that’s been playing festivals this year. Full disclosure: I’m in it, singing Dory’s praises to the skies.

-- Mental health struggles are real, common and not at all shameful. If you’re part of the music world, The NARAS non-profit MusiCares can help you with such issues.

-- The Bergman masterpiece I watched in a COVID haze was Fanny and Alexander — one of the greatest family sagas ever filmed. It’s not just a Christmas movie! Spans all the seasons, in fact. Fellow COvalids: This film is lengthy, sexy, dark and funny — perfect for viewing during a period of enforced downtime.

-- I guess I was on a mid-century male miserabilism kick while convalescing, because I also read that remarkable Richard Yates short story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, which had been sitting on myself since Tanita Tikaram named an album after it in 1992. Yates’s mordant, tender stories originally fit into the post-war pack that included works by Cheever, Updike and Roth, but many, especially the wickedly perceptive tale of writerly pride and foolishness, “Builders,” feel deeply relevant in 2024.

-- The strange, soothing sounds of the month-old Fuubutsushi album Meridians have been a balm in these disconcerting times. Space out and enjoy this multifaceted jazz quartet.

-- I am in Seattle and that means endless fish dinners.

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