Alex Wong

Alex Wong creates music to help people remember who they are and show themselves to the world.

Alex has always had a complicated relationship with his memories. Years ago he noticed with shock that he couldn’t remember his own childhood birthday parties that his sister would enthusiastically recall to him. At the same time, his mind has always been filled with vivid, sensory memories from dreams, places he’d never been, and what seemed almost like isolated vignettes from another life.

That dissonance led to the songs on his latest album, The Elephant and the Seahorse (2020, Tone Tree Music). The name pays homage to the famous memory of elephants, as well as the part of the brain that controls memory in humans, the hippocampus, shaped like a seahorse and named after its genus.

“As I examined my most vivid memories, I realized many of them were not from waking life, but of dreamscapes and detailed snapshots from places I'd never been.” One such memory depicts a scene where Alex is floating on a bed above a bottomless ravine between a mountain and a beach city at night, seeing giant mossy orbs with giant redwood trees growing from them, rotating slowly and silently. He attempts to describe this surreal scene musically in his piece “Nocturne,” the midway point on the album.

There were painful memories too. As he allowed himself to look more honestly at his past, he was forced to acknowledge that he had been “hiding” his identity as a second generation Asian American for much of his life. Memories of being told to downplay his ethnicity in order to succeed in school, social groups, or in the mostly-white music industry, assimilate to white culture as a kid, speak with no accent, and keep himself small rushed to the surface, along with waves of shame and anger for buying into this conditioning. A lot of deep questioning followed, which he chronicles for the first time in his song “Show Yourself,” containing one of the most personal and vulnerable lines he’s ever written:

I miss the sound of my father’s Chinese
Fading in the suburban breeze
Why do I run from what I used to be
Why am I hiding from my history?

Alex is a Latin GRAMMY-nominated artist and producer known for his work with Delta Rae, Vienna Teng, Melissa Ferrick and Ari Hest, among others. Alex’s music has been featured in movies The Last Song and The Lincoln Lawyer, TV shows True Blood, Ray Donovan, and One Tree Hill, and commercials for Google and Aquafina. Alex has toured all over the world, performing at festivals like Coachella, Outside Lands, and Corona Capital, in arenas in Mexico City and theaters in Europe and Japan, and on NPR’s Mountain Stage. During the lockdown, Alex curated and performed two virtual benefit tours featuring AAPI artists MILCK, Ruby Ibarra, Vienna Teng, Amulets, and Tom Prasada-Rao as well as others. The tours raised $10,000 to help organizations fighting anti-Asian hate via TheQuietVoiceFund.org