Alex Ebert
Label: Community Music | Booking: Kirk Sommer | Publicity: Rebecca Shapiro
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Alex Ebert (award-winning film composer), Edward Sharpe (platinum-selling hippy), Alexander (indie folk-rapper), Ima Robot (androgynous punk) - it’s all the same dude.
“I’ve always loved just making whatever art came to me, and felt sorry for the paradigm of artistry that constrains the artist to one look, one mode, one sound,” Ebert says. “I never related to that, and as an artist I resented it.” His urge to embrace it all had long conflicted with that artistic golden rule, “to thine own self be true”. Two years ago, while reflecting during a hiatus from Edward Sharpe, that conflict ended. Ebert realized that he had his own, different, just-as-valuable maxim: “To all thine selves be true."
For two decades, Ebert has created original music in myriad forms, styles, shapes, and sounds. From his earliest days as an emcee to the early-aughts buzz of Ima Robot, to the world-beating heights of Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, the critically acclaimed Alexander solo project, the Golden Globe-winning neoclassical film score composition for 2014’s All is Lost, and beyond, Ebert’s ability to lose himself in his art and achieve success is undeniable. Transcending boundary lines in the spirit of self-examination, he has spent the better part of the last few years completing a daunting amount of work, including 4 EPs, a biographical documentary feature film, and culminating with a genre-defying double-album of new material called 5AME! (the significance of the name will be divulged at release).
If there is one defining feature of this opus, it is the facility with which Ebert moves from one vocal delivery to another - from singing to rapping. "Rap is high-volume verbiage, so I felt I had to wait until I had enough on my mind to be able to fill up extended bars with meaningful lyrics," Ebert says. "Over the past two years, the lyrics that began coming to me were highly detailed and descriptive, too much to parse down to a singable phrase or two without losing their power. That’s when I knew I had to come back to rap."
Those familiar with the pre-Virgin Records output of Ima Robot or his solo song “Truth” may already recognize Ebert’s sing-song mic skills. But before any of that, Ebert began his music career rapping - a group called DVS Minds. Although it was his other bands and projects that eventually took off, his interest in rap never wavered, and the 5AME! double LP, while not easily labeled “hip-hop,” exists in some neighboring beats-and-rhymes-driven universe. Recorded and produced by Ebert in his Piety Studios in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans (where he has lived since 2013), the album is filled with that special kind of ingenuity required when working alone. The trio of singles - “Gold,” “Hands Up,” and “Automatic Youth” released simultaneously in Summer 2019, appropriately set the stage for two albums of music unlike anything you’ve heard before.
“There was liberty in finally realizing that the search for me—for my distinctive voice—was actually an embrace of all my voices,” he says. “And so I embraced more of my past, some of which I had been avoiding, and suddenly I am no longer hiding my different talents for the sake of brand-consistency or associated societal pressures. Fuck a consistent brand, that’s death to me. Suddenly it was my very inconsistency that became my superpower. To put such disparate things out in short order just communicates to myself, and to the world, that I’m not afraid of contextualizing one variety of expression with another.”
