Eating Shrooms, Getting F*cked Up, No Trailer: An Interview with Alexander Spit

Can you go into a little bit about what your creative process is like?

I have a little nook in the corner of my apartment…I’m not good with sizes, but it’s probably like a 15×10 foot room, tiny room. I have my vocal booth in the closet. I have a bunch of Christmas lights hanging up because I don’t like the lights that came with the apartment. I don’t like fluorescent lights. I’ve never been able to fully explain my creative process  because it’s very hit or miss. I go through…I think I go through more writer’s blocks than any other artists sometimes. I think that in my head sometimes. For me I’ve matured and grown to the point where I’ve learned not to force my creativity, but at the same time I like to create in an environment where I’m able to be as creative as I want to be.

I’ve created a feng shui where everything is in arms distance. Even if I’m in bed I can reach my notebook with ease or I can reach and turn over and grab my computer and start working on a track. It’s messy a lot of the time, like most people’s studios, but there’s a method to the madness. For me when it comes to working on music, especially nowadays since making music is a full-time gig for me, I find myself trying to work on music during the day, but I’m very much so a nighttime musician who likes to work on music past midnight in my lonesome. Where I can disregard other people’s opinions and disregard what other people think should be happening. I like hearing those opinions after the fact.

How do you think you’ve changed as an artist going from a young kid in San Francisco to today?

Man, a whole bunch. I actually haven’t even thought about that. Definitely a lot. Sonically, I don’t know exactly what sparked the change, but if you compare my music from when I was in San Francisco to when I moved to LA…sonically my music became more polished in regards to the sound of it–the mixes and the warmth of the tracks. I self engineer my music, you know, I’ve never gone to music school…everything I do has just been self-taught or by ear. As the years have gone on I’ve gotten better at mixing tracks. First and foremost, that for sure is a huge change.

As an artist overall, it’s kind of like I’ve come full circle. When I was living in San Francisco I had a lot of musical freedom because my following wasn’t big enough for me to worry about needing to satisfy them by putting out music every week or every month. I didn’t have the burden of stressing about trying to maintain this fan base and gain new fans. I was more on the tip of just creating and putting it out there and if it happens to be that people like it and happens to be what I want to do for the rest of my life.

When I moved to LA my following slowly but surely…more people started catching on considering LA is a little Mecca of music. I went through a phase, within my first year in LA, where I was really, really worried about what other artists thought about me or what fans thought about me. I was trying to adopt certain styles or certain mindsets…I was being brainwashed by the idea of fame being “the end all” what it means to be as an artist. The idea of being successful outweighed the idea of creativity at the time. That was in 2010. I went an entire year without making music because I was such a perfectionist. I was creating nothing that I wanted to put out.

Eventually I put out this mixtape called These Long Strange Nights which was kind of like the result of me losing it. I was taking a bunch of drugs, going to a  really dark place…pretty much losing it, locking myself in my room and just making music. I was really worried and scared at the time because I didn’t know what the response would be when I put it out. Then when I put that out people where telling me that it was my best work…that it was the best work I’ve put out. People said that it was something that they could finally really relate to. Up until that point people said they enjoyed the music, but when that came out I could see that when people actually started to believe in the music I would make.

It’s the same old sob story…sometimes to really come up and grow into, on some Phoenix shit, be the artist you need to be you need to break down and go through some shit. I had the opportunity to do that when I first moved to LA.

Bringing it back to the question, it’s really like I’ve come full circle. I’m back into a place where I don’t really give a fuck what is hot. I no longer give a fuck about what people are expecting to hear from me. The only thing I consider with my creativity is making sure that I’m happy with the product. I really believe in the idea of artists having a spine and standing up for the things they put out and standing up for the things they talk about and not changing those things every three months following the trends in music.

Can you describe the best trip you’ve ever had?

One of the best trips that I ever had was when we shot the video for “A Breathtaking Trip”. Which was definitely the intention. That was actually my 25th birthday. Along with the intake of weed, alcohol and mushrooms there was another thing to factor in that gets overlooked by a lot of people, but there was a whole shitload of sleep deprivation involved with that. I had no sleep for two days prior to shooting that video. When we shot the video we started at 5AM and went straight from the hotel to skidrow after I got a ten minute nap or something. We ended up in a 120 degree desert, eating shrooms, getting fucked up, no trailer, just shooting a video.

That was definitely a trip.

I had to continually tell myself I was doing something creative and doing my art and that giving into the heat and sleep deprivation would be me giving into the idea of giving up on my art. It was on some higher level thinking shit.

I had a crazy mushroom trip on my last day at SXSW where I thought the grass was alligators and shit. I’ve had some crazy moments. My first mushroom trip was probably the craziest because I’d never even seen or expected that type of reality as even an option for a human being. Every single time is different. I ate mushrooms last night. [laughs] That was fun.

I’m all about knowing that there’s a little bit of psychedelic reality in every moment. It just happens to be that when you’re on mushrooms that you notice it more. I mainly eat them to get my head right so I can notice that. That the shit that I see on a regular basis and the life that I live on a day-to-day basis is that there’s a lot more to it than I can see.