‘And I’ll never write my love songs / Scratched out on the Berlin Wall”, Montreal-based songwriter Alex Nicol reflects in a haunting tenor on latest single “Hollywood”. Though sung with arresting earnestness, you can’t help but detect a glint of wry humor in the line, a subtle nod to David Bowie’s famous anthem “Heroes”.
It’s underscored by the grainy VHS-recorded music video, where Nicol ambles around deserted arcades and a bargain basement wax museum, depicting disturbingly ersatz effigies of the rich and famous. “Hollywood” is a song that exists in lustrous ambivalence: the clandestine yearning for validation and glory, filtered through the acceptance of one’s grounded reality.
“Lyrically, “Hollywood” is a reflective song in which I begrudgingly accept that I have failed to find success yet,” Nicol says of the song. “With Hollywood symbolizing the fame-in-youth narrative that, because I am no longer young, I will never be able to claim. But if the verses are where I list all the things I will never do, in the choruses I remind myself of all that nourishes me at home, and how far I have come. I have always considered myself a late bloomer, and Hollywood ends optimistically: me and the great blue sky, and all the opportunity that it conveys. Hollywood is a signpost in my path as a musician, marking the end of my youth, in which I was ravaged by self-doubt, and the beginning of my next chapter, in which the sky’s the limit.”
The release of “Hollywood” coincides with the launch of Nicol’s new EP Been A Long Year Vol. 1, which can be streamed here.
Watch the video for “Hollywood” below.
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