Alex Nicol is a rising Montréal-based singer/songwriter, who spent five year period playing in a number of different projects, including Hoan, an act that released their critically applauded EP Modern Phase back in 2017.
Nicol stepped out into the spotlight as a solo artist with the release of his full-length debut 2020’s All For Nada. All For Nada featured “Trust,” a slow-burning and gauzy song built around the Montréal-based artist’s achingly plaintive falsetto, shimmering guitars, a supple bass line and a soaring hook. And while the song reminded me of Canadian freak folk outfit Loving, the song as Nicol explained in press notes “is about whatever meaning the listener finds in it. For me, it’s about doing laundry (appreciating mundane tasks), honouring old traditions, striving to be a more ecological person, the realities of climate change on everyday life. . . ”
All For Nada‘s long anticipated follow-up Been A Long Year Vol. 1 EP was released last month. The EP’s last single, the bittersweet sigh “Hollywood” is built around a haunting arrangement featuring strummed acoustic guitar, twinkling keys and gently padded drumming paired with the Canadian artist’s achingly tender falsetto expressing the tension of unrealized dreams and aspirations — and a begrudgingly uneasy acceptance of the present. Certainly, if you’re in a creative field you’ve felt this deeply and have acknowledged in your life. But there’s also a deeper — and infinitely more positive — acknowledgment at the core of the song: that the narrator has actually accomplished something and has come a very long way to do so.
“Lyrically, ‘Hollywood’ is a reflective song in which I begrudgingly accept that I have failed to find success yet, with Hollywood symbolizing the fame-in-youth narrative that, because I am no longer young, I will never be able to claim,” the Montréal-based singer/songwriter explains. “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.”
Directed by Alexander Maxim Seltzer, the accompanying video for “Hollywood” is shot on grainy camcorder cassette tape, and follows Nicols at Niagara Falls imitating seagulls, then at a what appears to be a Montréal-based arcade — by himself. The video ends with Nicol going to a low-budget wax museum, where the celebrities don’t quite look right. The video ends with Nicol pretending to be interviewed by a wax figure Jimmy Fallon, which further emphasizes the feeling of unfulfilled dreams and aspirations.
