‘I want to make music like this’: Austin & the Syd Experience steps out with new live album

When Syd Alexis first held a vinyl copy of the new Austin & the Syd Experience live album, for a brief moment she found herself whisked back to childhood and the hours she spent listening to her parents’ record collections on an imposing turntable inherited from a grandparent.

“It was one of those old school, giant, really heavy record players, and it was from my grandad on my mom’s side, and she had inherited it,” said Alexis, who will join guitarist Austin Johnson, drummer Brandon Pettiford, and bassist John Zuck in celebrating the release of Live at Natalie’s at Used Kids Records on Friday, Dec. 12. “And I do think about that sometimes. And ever since I was a kid, I always wanted to make music, and I dreamed about releasing my own music. But to actually have physical copies, to be able to hold it, and for that to be my reality, it’s just incredible. It’s so gratifying.”

This sense of gratification might be intensified by how close it came to not happening, with Alexis having initially declined Johnson’s overtures when the guitarist first approached her about making music together early in 2022. At the time, Alexis had just started a new job. And determined to put all of her energy into the gig, she temporarily shelved all of her musical pursuits.

“And then I ended up leaving that job … and one of [Johnson’s] family members saw me at ComFest, and we were talking and I was like, ‘Yeah, I just left my job and blah, blah, blah.’ And then a couple days passed, and Austin called me and he was like, ‘Hey … do you want to get a band together now,’” Alexis said, and laughed. “We’ve been writing music ever since.”

Early on, the band toyed with covers and gigged out as a means to build chemistry between the players, finally beginning to home in on its voice as the musicians incorporated more original songs into their set, many shaped by the classic rock, blues and soul they listened to growing up. “When I started discovering music on my own, it was rock and roll, and it was a lot of David Bowie, Prince, Jimi Hendrix, Janice Joplin,” Alexis said. “And that sound really formed what I wanted to be as an artist, like, I want to make music like this.”

Live at Natalie’s delivers on this promise, combining blues rock songs (“Mother”), funk excursions (“Only If the Music Allows”), and streamlined, 1970s-style guitar jams (“Aphrodite,” carried along on Alexis’ gale-force vocals). But while the music often sounds crafted with festival stages in mind, the lyrics tend to center more intimate moments, Alexis delivering lines that read as internal monologues – she sings of living inside of her own head on “Gatekeeper” – or conversations between intimates. “Your little girl, she’s all grown up,” Alexis sings on “Mother,” a line she penned as a means of addressing the woman who helped to raise her.

“And that one, that’s actually a very personal song, and I wrote it six years ago, when I was in my first band,” said Alexis, who joined her first band, the Jimmy Hudson Band, following a stint in which she worked as a backup singer for an Elvis Presley impersonator. “And at the time, I was having this conversation with my mom about how I wanted to be a blues singer. And she didn’t like that idea too much, and she was telling me I was supposed to be a gospel singer. And I haven’t forsaken that part of me; that’s how I grew up, in the church, and that part of me is very much still there. But it was like, ‘Well, this is what I want to do. I’m an adult, and I love you, but you have to respect my wishes on this.’ And that’s why one of the lines on ‘Mother’ is ‘I can love the Lord, and I can sing the blues. Why do I have to choose?’”

While the tunes populating the live record tend to radiate intimacy, not all of them relate directly back to the singer’s experiences, Alexis at times leaning into character-driven studies that allow her to step into a variety of shoes. “I like to get into character, and I like to tell stories,” she said. “And I feel like that’s the type of power music holds, where even if I don’t speak this language, it’ll translate to someone else, and they can interpret it however they see fit.”

At times in Natalie’s concert, which took place last Halloween, these lines could blur for the singer, who acknowledged that she carried the anxieties she felt coming into the evening into her performance of “My Song,” which begins lost in “tears of solitude” and soon blossoms into a soaring rock anthem.

“When we got to singing ‘My Song,’ there were a lot of things going through my head, and I got really emotional. … And because of that, you can hear the cracks in my voice, and you can hear me fighting back tears,” said Alexis, who initially struggled with including the performance on the album. “And the more and more I thought about it, the more I was like, ‘You know what? Let’s just go for it anyway.’ And I think now maybe it’s one of those songs I underestimated a bit. … Sometimes I might be singing more for someone else who needs that song. And sometimes, depending on where I’m at in my life, it can be like, ‘I needed this, too.’”