Rex Orange County – Interview about “The Alexander Technique”

“My first few albums all led up to this one in my head,” says the English artist known as Rex Orange County of his intimate but musically passionate upcoming album. “It's exactly what I've always wanted to do.”

Apt title The Alexander Techniquewhich is out on September 6th on RCA, the album actually feels like a groundbreaking work. Rex (born Alexander O'Connor) began the project in 2020, around the same time he was creating his third album, Who cares?, in which he worked almost exclusively with the Dutch musician and songwriter Benny Sings.

For AlexanderThe 26-year-old artist took a very different approach. Rex brought his “two best friends” Jim Reed and Teo Halm on board and welcomed more collaborators than ever before – notably musicians such as bassist Pino Palladino, keyboardists Cory Henry, Finn Carter and Reuben James, and pedal steel guitarist Henry Webb-Jenkins. ““Especially with the first few albums, I thought, 'Please don't do this, I know how it should be,'” says Rex. “That was the first time I was thinking of different people's ideas – and there were a lot more songs.”

Finally he realized that Who cares not only had to be released first, but The Alexander Technique would have deserved much more time as it was “more demanding overall”. As a result, the artist has released his longest album to date, which offers a tracklist of 16 songs compared to his usual 10. “I've never done that before,” he says of the “intense” experience – and describes what sounds like a thorough emotional cleansing. “That's why it's The Technology.”

“I had this strange situation in the first three years of my career that every song that came out was every song I had ever written,” he continues. “I had no reason to write one that wasn't [make it]. I thought it would just confuse me. Which, I admit, is the case. But [this album] has evolved so much over such a long period of time. The deeper you dig, the more you find.”

Since the release of his critically acclaimed debut album Apricot Princess, in 2017 – which established Rex Orange County as a brutally honest songwriter and accomplished musician – his formulaic approach to album creation worked well. His 2019 project pony debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard 200, placing him at the forefront of a generation that mixed indie alternative pop with raw writing.

And while Who cares? (which debuted at number 5 on the list) took on bigger pop swings to support his more positive lyricism, Rex assures that The Alexander Technique is where his more emotional writings from that period ended. (In the fall of 2022, the artist pleaded not guilty to six counts of sexual assault; by December of that year, all charges were dropped.) “It felt like this album was maybe more of a diary entry—what I was getting into and how deep the emotional depth was,” he says.

Elsewhere, there's a personal favorite, “Guitar Song,” the first track he made with Reed and Halm (“It sounds pretty much the same as the day we made it in 2021 – it's free and the ending is crazy,” he says). “Look Me In the Eyes,” on which he collaborated with James Blake, he calls “the most heartbreaking song I've ever heard.” And on his standout song, “Therapy,” he talks about entering the industry at 17 and going to therapy at 22 – “and no, I don't regret anything,” he sings. “I got up, I fell down and then I found peace.”

Despite the long running time of just over 50 minutes, Alexander is a masterpiece of concision, with the opening song “Alexander” – the first song Rex wrote for this album – being the most perfect example. The nearly five-minute song finds Rex singing over the piano as if he were passing the time between songs in an intimate, dimly lit jazz bar. (Stevie Wonder is one of his favorites.)

“It was written pretty quickly, and that doesn't always happen to me,” he says of the song, which tells the true story of a frustrating 2019 doctor's visit. During his stay there, he complained of persistent back pain, only to learn that it was more likely stress, anger and a troubled mind that was causing him pain. “In a weird way, I feel like maybe he was right/I might be using my back pain to distract from the pain of life/I feel everything on the outside when it's really just on the inside,” Rex sings.

“I don't want a whole album of five-minute stories where I speak at the piano, but I want each song to feel as succinct and thoughtful as possible,” he says. “So that was quite a task for me.”

Ultimately, “Alexander” set the tone of the entire album, right down to its ambiguous title. Although there is an Alexander Technique – known to help achieve inner balance both mentally and physically, as a focus of the practice is on posture – Rex says writing this album made him stronger in the end. “Even though I still have terrible posture, it was honestly more like – this is my real Alexander Technique,” he says. “I'm myself, not Rex Orange County.”

He plans to carry that change over to his upcoming tour, which he calls (like the album) his most ambitious show yet. He's been rehearsing since June and says he's particularly enjoyed playing “2008” — a driving, upbeat song with janky falsetto harmonies — live, while “New Years” felt most natural to him. He's also hinted at plans to change something up at each show — and while that could mean anything from a different setlist to a surprise song a la Taylor Swift, he's keeping most of the details under wraps for now.

The tour will hit select theaters in cities like Chicago, Toronto, New York, Los Angeles and London, where there will be mini-performances – likely a one-off for this album, he says – that will allow for a more complex set that will be “heavily tied to one of the visual locations” featured in his music videos. “The stage is tied to the place I wanted to take you to as a listener,” he says. “[To a] more relaxed state”,

Considering how much of an artistic statement it is The Alexander Technique Rex admits that it feels “strangely” like an end of sorts. “You have a different perspective,” he says of his mid-twenties and his nearly ten years of professional experience in the industry. “It's not the end of the era, but I definitely feel a different awareness and maybe a different maturity,” he says. “I still love music and want to keep making music – And I want to keep changing it. That's the most important thing to me.”

However, the first place seems to be taken by his new-found preference for putting himself first. In “Therapy” he sings, as always, succinctly: “I was able to recharge my batteries – and I came back.”