On Friday, June 16, the Kessler Theater is bringing the Video Bar back to life for one night. They will be playing “era-specific music videos all night,” which will include the full-length version of Nine Inch Nails performing at The Video Bar in 1990.

And the music videos aren’t the only thing returning to Dallas: members of the team who worked at the Video Bar will also be in attendance.

Bart Weiss, who will be hosting the reunion with Video Bar regular Helen Stark, was involved with both On the Air and The Video Bar. His job was to program the videos they would play each night. While it seems like a dream job for the man who would eventually co-found Dallas VideoFest, he wasn’t initially sold on the medium.

“During that era, I was a film guy,” says Weiss. “I taught filmmaking. And to me the video stuff looked really… I don’t know, it just didn’t look that great.” 

However, Weiss was instrumental in getting On the Air off the ground. He mentioned an idea for a bar in Dallas that showed music videos while he was out one night. It didn’t take long before he was contacted by someone who had purchased a space in Lower Greenville. The buyer said he was open to making the property either a gym, or working with Weiss to create his music video bar. Weiss decided to take the opportunity.

“To understand On the Air, you [have] to understand why music videos were important at that time. And they were culturally significant because…people watched MTV and saw music they couldn’t see. But then we showed things that MTV wasn’t playing,” says Weiss.

Sometimes On the Air showed music videos from bands that were not in MTV’s lineup. Other times, though, Weiss screened alternate versions of videos that were in circulation—ones that wouldn’t have been appropriate for a television audience.

“So, like, there is a Duran Duran video for “Girls on Film,” [and] the club version is much more interesting than the one they could show on MTV,” says Weiss, laughing. He also recalls a version of Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s “Relax” that was “definitely not airable,” but a perfect fit for On the Air. (“Girls on Film” was actually created for clubs like the Video Bar, where there was no limit to the content they could show.)

While the music was integral to On the Air, the videos had another important role: they brought audiences into the world of the artists. “People used to…care about what they looked like in a different kind of way,” remembers Weiss. “Like, my hair was asymmetrical and I never wore jeans… But the thing is, the people in the music videos dressed well, so when you were in the club, sitting there or dancing to what was on the screen, it’s like [you were]…visually part of that world.”

On the Air ultimately closed down due to mismanagement. “He didn’t pay the rent. And he didn’t tell anybody that he didn’t pay the rent,” Weiss says of the owner. “So, literally, April Fool’s Day, we go there, and there’s a lock on the door, and the club is closed.”

The staff got together and ultimately decided to start The Video Bar in Deep Ellum. The core idea remained the same, to start a club showcasing the intersection of music and video. Weiss spent several years working as the artistic director for the bar before moving on. 

“After I left, they got much more involved with live music,” says Weiss. “And my version was, it’s all about the video. But that’s fine. It worked well. And there was a very famous Nine Inch Nails show that was…a really big cultural moment.”

Even as the venue began focusing more on live shows, Weiss says other VJs came in and continued the work the club was built on. The Video Bar was making other changes, however. One was the introduction of “Sadistic Sundays,” which brought videos with heavier S&M themes into rotation.

“We had sexual material that we showed, but it wasn’t the highlight, [it was just] a little spicier…to round out other things. But that was…the aesthetic direction as [The Video Bar] moved on,” says Weiss. The venue eventually closed.

After leaving the Video Bar, Weiss continued working as an educator and writing about video. On the Air and The Video Bar were an important part of his life, but they were behind him—until recently.

“Jeff Liles, who runs the Kessler…thought it would be a really good idea to bring this all back,” says Weiss. 

Liles reached out to Ron Stanley, who worked as a VJ at The Video Bar and took on more responsibilities after Weiss left. They also involved Helen Stark, who was a regular at the venue and runs a Facebook page dedicated to On the Air and The Video Bar.

Stanley will VJ the “Video Bar Reunion,” an opportunity for former attendees to reminisce, while also bringing the music videos of the period to newer generations.

As much as the event will be about recreating the experience of The Video Bar, it’s also a throwback to a different era of Dallas, when someone could casually toss off an idea for a bar that showed music videos, have someone else take the idea seriously, and turn it into a staple of Dallas culture for the better part of a decade.

“It was a moment when anything could happen,” says Weiss. “And there were people and artists, musicians, in all kinds of areas, [and] we all kind of knew each other, and we worked on stuff together, and…forged this interesting time. It was a wonderful time to be here.”

The post Deep Ellum’s Video Bar Lives For a Night at the Kessler Theater appeared first on D Magazine.

June 9-11| Texas Trust Credit Union Theatre, Grand Prairie

Re:SET, a traveling music festival that takes place over four weekends in June, features North Texas as its first stop. San Francisco, Atlanta, and New Orleans follow. Acts include boygenius, Steve Lacy, Foushee, LCD Soundsystem, Toro y Moi, James Blake, Big Freedia, and Jamie XX. Single-day and three-day tickets are available. Get tickets.

Christopher Cross and Air Supply

June 9, 7:30 p.m.| Bass Performance Hall, Fort Worth

Yacht rock and dad rock converge on Cowtown Friday night as Christopher Cross and Air Supply share a bill at Bass Performance Hall. Expect San Antonio-native Cross to bring his hits like “Sailing,” “Ride Like the Wind,” and “Arthur’s Theme.” Air Supply will bring 80s prom favorites like “All Out of Love,” “Every Woman in the World,” and “Here I Am.” The show benefits the University of North Texas Health Science Center. Get tickets.

Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band

June 10, 6 p.m.| The Grove @ Mustang Station, Farmers Branch

Farmers Branch throws Denton Drive Live, a free outdoor concert series, every year from April to July. This week’s Cajun themed party not only offers Cajun band Chubby Carrier & the Bayou Swamp Band, but also all the crawfish you can eat, courtesy Roots Southern Table. The event will also offer games, shaved ice and ice cream, and other dining options for purchase. The concert is free, but tickets for the crawfish boil are $40 each. They are available for presale and first-come, first serve at the event. Jean Pierre and the Zydeco Angels open. Get tickets.

Duran Duran

June 10, 7 p.m.| American Airlines Center

Duran Duran is on a 26-city North American tour, and will hit Dallas Saturday night in the first leg of that tour. Expect plenty of favorites: “Girls on Film,” “Rio,” “Wild Boys,” “Notorious,” and pretty much every other song you can remember from their extensive catalog will be included in the setlist. Bastille and NIle Rodgers and Chic will open. Get tickets.

Pride in Bloom

June 10 and 11| Dallas Arboretum

Turtle Creek Chorale, Nathan Ratliff, The Women’s Chorus of Dallas, Dezi 5, and Dalene Richelle will perform during the Arboretum’s two-day Pride in Bloom event. The weekend will offer LGBTQ+ artists, entertainers, chefs, and vendors. Attendees can shop, listen to music, and take part in the community picnic celebration among the ribbon chandelier-bedecked trees in the Pecan Grove. (Visitors are invited to pack a lunch, or purchase one at the event.) Muralist MOM will provide an interactive mural experience, and the Rory Meyers Children’s Adventure Garden will offer hands-on activities. Get tickets. (Go here to see a full list of Pride events this weekend and beyond.)

Also check out:

Sunny War and Las Los, June 9, 7 p.m., Klyde Warren Park. Get details

Koe Wetzel, June 9, 7:30 p.m., Dickies Arena, Fort Worth. Get tickets

Tab Benoit, June 9, 8 p.m., Tannahill’s Tavern and Music Hall, Fort Worth. Get tickets

Bones, Xavier Wulf, and Eddy Baker, June 9, 8 p.m., South Side Ballroom. Get tickets

Colorwaave #002, feat. Funrula, Natural Hiigh, and Ev DeShaw, June 9, 8 p.m., 919 Morell Ave. Get tickets

Dale Watson, June 9, 8:30 p.m., Levitt Pavilion, Arlington. Get details

Brent Cobb, June 9, 10 p.m., Billy Bob’s Texas, Fort Worth. Get tickets

Palooza in the Park w/ DJ K-Sprinkles, Ceci Ceci, and Maya Piata, June 10, 11 a.m., Museum Green, Fair Park. Get details

Parker McCollum, June 10, 7:30 p.m., Dos Equis Pavilion. Get tickets

Otep, June 10, 7:30 p.m., Trees. Get tickets

Muscadine Bloodline, June 10, 8 p.m., The Factory in Deep Ellum. Get tickets

Revelers Hall Band with Sassafras Swing, June 10, 8 p.m., The Kessler. Get tickets

Musa Keys, June 10, 9 p.m., Rokwood Nightclub and Bar. Get tickets

Dillon Nathaniel and Sacha Robotti, June 10, 10 p.m., Stereo Live. Get tickets

Monte Montgomery, June 11, 5 p.m., Louie Louie’s Dueling Piano Bar. Get tickets

Heart Attack Man, June 11, 6 p.m., Trees. Get tickets

Dikembe, June 11, 7 p.m., Andy’s Bar, Denton. Get tickets

Ondara, June 11, 7 p.m., Cambridge Room at House of Blues. Get tickets

Nate Fredrick and The Wholesome Boys, June 11, 8 p.m., Sundown at Granada. Get tickets

To see what concerts are coming to North Texas this year, go here.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: June 9-11 appeared first on D Magazine.

This has proved to be the case with Fort Worth singer-songwriter Abraham Alexander, who I spent a little time with just before he released his fantastic debut album, SEA/SONS. In the weeks since I wrote about Alexander for our June issue, he was added to the ACL Festival lineup and announced a U.K/European tour supporting labelmates the Lumineers. And on Wednesday, the legendary guitar maker Gibson named him its first Marquee Artist, throwing its considerable resources behind him.

Last night, he kicked off a three-show run at The Kessler in Oak Cliff. Tonight is sold out but as of this writing there were a few tickets left for Saturday night’s gig.

If you miss it, I wouldn’t worry too much. You are going to have plenty of chances to catch Alexander again; he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Just to bigger venues maybe.

My profile, from the June issue of the magazine, is online today. Get to know our soon-to-be star.

The post Arlington’s Own Abraham Alexander is Blazing Trails appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Abraham Alexander Is Ready for His Star Turn appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: June 2-4 appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: May 26-29 appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Weekend: May 19-21 appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post A Dispatch from the Texas Return of the Academy of Country Music Awards appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Week: May 12-14 appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Week: May 5-7 appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Here’s Who Is Coming to Dallas This Week: April 28-30 appeared first on D Magazine.

Abraham Alexander cuts quite the figure as he moves through the iHeartRadio offices on a Friday afternoon in early March. 

The 32-year-old singer-songwriter from Fort Worth (by way of Arlington and Athens—Greece, not East Texas) is built like a box-to-box midfielder rather than the forward and defender he played on soccer pitches through college, sturdy and compact. He’s model handsome and stylish, even in a maroon sweatshirt and cuffed olive pants, the kind of guy who wears his clothes instead of letting them wear him. (His zip-up Gucci ankle boots, the signature horse bit glinting under the overhead fluorescents, don’t hurt.) He has a smile that lights up his surroundings like a Fresnel lens, sweeping in front of him so it lands on everyone along the way. He carries himself like a six-time Grammy winner on his way to one of the coasts instead of an artist a month away from releasing his debut album, SEA/SONS.

Alexander showed up a few minutes ago for his midday appearance on 97.1 The Freak’s Ben and Skin Show, on time and alone, guitar in hand. You can easily imagine a scenario where, two months from now, maybe a year, he will have people. Someone to drive him here and there, another to lug his guitar around, perhaps one more to make excuses for why he has arrived late and why he must leave early, sorry. He will be firmly and forever behind one gate or another. It happens all the time.

But in Alexander’s case, you can just as easily imagine a scenario where it won’t. Shouldn’t it have already happened? Hasn’t he earned an ego trip or two? He may be only now releasing his debut, but one of his songs, the original recording of “Stay” (a new version of which appears on SEA/SONS, augmented by a guitar solo from Gary Clark Jr.), has amassed almost 8 million streams on Spotify, and several others have popped up on various TV shows. He has played high-profile gigs across the country and overseas and was chosen to perform at Dirk Nowitzki’s retirement party in 2019. Last fall, he was one of the faces of Southern luxury brand Billy Reid’s collaboration with guitar maker Gibson. Earlier this year, he stole the show at a pre-Grammy tribute to Lucinda Williams at L.A.’s fabled Troubadour that also featured the likes of Dwight Yoakam, Mumford & Sons, Molly Tuttle, and Madison Cunningham. In June, he will headline three shows at the Kessler Theater, two of which have sold out as of this writing. (Only one date was originally booked, but the others were added due to demand.) Alexander hasn’t quite caught up to his buddies Leon Bridges and Charley Crockett, but he’s not too far behind.

He’s about to get closer. SEA/SONS is a no-skips stunner, its folk-music foundation allowing Alexander to gently genre hop from the classic R&B of “Tears Run Dry” to the skittering electronic rhythms of “Dèjá Vu” (which features a stirring guest spot by the legendary Mavis Staples) and the haunting, hip-hop-indebted “Today.” “Heart of Gold,” to my ear, wouldn’t sound out of place on one of Radiohead’s more recent albums, and “Xavier” (as well as its album-ending reprise “Amen”) is gospel in form and content, layered vocals stacked to the heavens, lyrics that manage to uplift amid sadness. But Alexander’s soulful vocals make them all feel right at home under the same roof. He has a voice that is like finding a key in your pocket that fits into a door you didn’t realize was locked, satisfying a need you weren’t aware of until it had already been met. 

Today’s interview and performance on Ben and Skin is more or less the beginning of the promotional cycle for SEA/SONS, set to release on April 14 on Dualtone Records, the label behind the Grammy-nominated, platinum-selling Lumineers, among others. Next week, he will make the rounds at SXSW in Austin, a couple of official showcases among a full schedule of unofficial duties. After his trio of shows at the Kessler, he will play this year’s edition of Bonnaroo later in June and the storied Newport Folk Festival at the end of July. 

“You know, you dream about these things, and then you snap your fingers and now I’m getting to do it,” Alexander told me a few days earlier at Pax & Beneficia Coffee in downtown Fort Worth. “But it’s taken 10 years to get here. It’s taken me that long. Just 10 years ago I was learning how to play the guitar, and eight years ago I was doing my first open mic. Now I get to release my debut record. It’s surreal. They say if everything we do dies with us, then our vision was too small. And now I get to release something that will forever outlive me.”

The truth is, it’s taken a lot longer than 10 years. The first lines Alexander sings on SEA/SONS are “How many times I get carried away/Like a leaf in a sea on a wave.” That might sum up his entire life in one couplet. Because he’s been on one wave or another since he was 11 years old. 

Alexander didn’t see the first wave coming. How could he? It was 2001 and he was too young, just a kid splashing in the surf of the Aegean Sea with his brothers and their friends. They were all children of West African immigrants who had moved to Greece looking for something better and were still looking years later. Alexander and the others weren’t old enough yet to understand how difficult that had been or see how hard it continued to be. 

There was the incident at the grocery store, for example. While shopping with his family, Alexander bumped into a display, knocking off a bag of chips, which he dutifully picked up and returned to its place on the rack. But another customer loudly chastised him for touching the bag, saying now no one would want to buy it. Soon the entire store had turned against Alexander and his family—at least it felt that way—and they were forced to leave.

Alexander and his friends—a group that sometimes included future Milwaukee Bucks star Giannis Antetokounmpo and his brothers—could escape to the ocean, roam around the Acropolis in the shadow of the Parthenon, ride bikes, be kids. Their parents had fewer opportunities to shrug off the racism and xenophobia that had become part of their daily existence. Fewer opportunities in general.

So that first wave came, carrying him from Athens to Arlington, Texas, a place that not even the most generous civic booster would describe as remotely similar to anywhere in Greece. Worse if you don’t speak English and live in a small apartment with your parents and two brothers.

“It was just what was affordable at the time,” Alexander says, “and I had friends around that would just say Texas is the place to be.”

Even though the wave had carried him far away, it did not take him under, though it certainly came close a few times. The next wave almost did.

Months after Nikki and Toks Ademola brought their three sons to Texas, Nikki was killed by a drunken driver, and everything fell apart. The family was scattered. Toks had long been violent toward his children, continuing a cycle of abuse, so the boys were taken away. Alexander—he changed his name when he started performing—went to live with his ESL teacher and eventually landed with a foster family, Donnia and Jeff Olesko. (They formally adopted him in 2018.) He had been carried away again. 

Music wasn’t part of the picture yet, even though his mother had been a singer and his father was a guitarist who had played with Afrobeat pioneer Fela Kuti in Nigeria before leaving for Greece. 

“Our relationship wasn’t the best, and so I kind of wanted everything but that,” Alexander says. “He forced it on my eldest brother, and he was very pushy. I was like, ‘Man, I want nothing to do with that.’ And I felt like he was paying so much attention to him that I wanted my own thing. And so sports was that for me.”

Specifically, soccer. He made the all-district squad as a goal-scoring forward at Arlington Lamar High School while also playing for the Dallas Texans Soccer Club, a select team that has produced U.S. Men’s National Team members such as Clint Dempsey and Lee Nguyen. Soccer earned him a scholarship to Texas Wesleyan, where he started at right back. 

Then that wave crashed, too. While Alexander hadn’t been expecting that soccer would turn into a career, he did think he would have some say in how his playing days ended. But he wrecked his knee and that was that. 

A girlfriend gave him a guitar to pass the time, and he finally had enough distance from his father to pick it up. One of the first songs he learned was “Is This Love,” by Bob Marley and the Wailers. “Super easy chords,” he says. It took him a week to get it down, watching Marty Schwartz’s instructional video on YouTube. “I grew up with music around the house, so musical notes were always in my ear, and so I think that’s helped me kind of shorten that gap.”

Another unofficial teacher was Gary Clark Jr., the Grammy-winning guitarist and singer from Austin. Watching his videos, seeing another Black man with a guitar, Alexander saw a path he might walk, too. Which is why he calls it “insane” that Clark ended up on SEA/SONS. (As long as we are talking about full circle moments, it should be mentioned that another song Alexander learned early on was Extreme’s “More Than Words.” When he performed at Nowitzki’s retirement party, the big German picked up his guitar—“It looked like a ukulele in his arms”—and proceeded to play the 1990 ballad.)

And then, at long last, he began to catch better waves. A year after he started playing guitar, around 2014, a chance encounter at the bank teller job he was working brought him to the place where the producers Austin Jenkins and Josh Block were recording a young singer-songwriter named Leon Bridges. He saw them unloading amps and got out of his car to talk to them. That led to him humming on a track and forging a connection with Bridges that has led to everything else. Bridges encouraged him to start playing open mic nights (“I didn’t know open mic nights existed”) and invited him to perform at his birthday party (“I had one song written—barely written—and I played it”). Bridges introduced him to Charley Crockett, another fellow traveler who has opened doors for him, bringing him along on a West Coast tour. 

“I’m not lucky,” Alexander says. “I think I’m fortunate. I heard this recently that luck is someone who grows a farm but didn’t plant the seed. But fortunate is the fact that you planted a seed, but it rained and it shined.”

By May 2018, Alexander was, perhaps, as far away from that little Greek boy playing in the water as he had ever been, though he was now only separated by a relatively short flight. He was a man now, a musician, speaking (and singing) with no trace of a Greek or Nigerian accent. 

A wave finally brought him back across the ocean, not to Athens but to London—close enough, the same continent at least. It had been almost two decades. By then, “I’ve lived this whole life,” he says. 

At the time, he wasn’t sure if his career in the music business would last. He had done enough to know he had a present but not enough to guarantee a future. He was still learning to love his voice, and he had played his first real show only a little more than a year earlier, opening up for the R&B singer Ginuwine at House of Blues, working up to a full set by playing open mic nights at the Live Oak Music Hall in Fort Worth. 

A few months earlier, he had poured all of his money into recording a song he’d titled “America,” written in the wake of the police killings of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in Minnesota: “America/Land of the free/You tell me to run/But there’s shackles on me,” he sang on the chorus. Mahogany, a company based out of London, heard enough in “America” to bring him over to write a few songs and play some shows, see what might come of it. So he was in England to find out if there was a future or if this was another dream he would have to say goodbye to.

As Alexander got dressed in the greenroom backstage at London’s St. Pancras Old Church, preparing to open for the New Zealand soul singer Teeks, it all came rushing back. He heard a voice behind him, and when he turned around, there he was: his childhood best friend, Chris, separated all that time and grown up now, too, but instantly identifiable, unmistakable, the way brothers are. “It was like finding a lost part of yourself,” Alexander says.

Chris showed Alexander the photograph he had brought with him: five shirtless boys, their backs to the camera, wading in the clear Aegean water. Except for Chris, who has fallen onto his hands and knees. Little Abraham stands over him, looking down. 

It was overwhelming. Alexander was at a trough between waves, hearing British accents mixed with voices speaking in Greek and Yoruba, a Nigerian dialect, feeling at once very close and very far from home. He emptied all of those feelings into “Stay”: “Tell me if I go too far/Would I become the lonesome lone star?/Tell me if I go too far/Would I ever find my way back?”

“Stay” would become the centerpiece of SEA/SONS. The photo of Alexander and his brothers and friends in the sea would become a painting that would become the cover of the album. The wave had brought him all the way home. 

Back at the iHeartRadio offices, it’s clear that Abraham Alexander is not a star in the making but a star in the flesh, his mere presence gravitational, making every eye angle in his direction, every neck crane to see who is here. Walking behind him, the bees on his bootheels fluttering down the hallways, you see the effect he has on people. He has a charisma that presents itself almost like a magic trick, making everyone in the room feel as though he is talking directly—and only—to them. He gives them all a moment, an interaction, eye contact, genuine questions.

Once Alexander is seated in The Freak’s studio high above the Tollway, Michael Gruber, a board operator and producer for the station, comes over to adjust the microphone placement. Nothing too technical, just moving one of the mics in front of the Epiphone guitar resting on his knees, but Alexander lets Gruber know he appreciates it.

“That’s fire,” he says, as Gruber smiles bashfully.

With Ben and Skin, Alexander is in friendly territory: he worked with Jeff “Skin” Wade on the Truth to Power Project compilation in 2021, on which he memorably covered Simon & Garfunkel’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” (He made it his own, adding the call-and-response refrain “Don’t trouble the waters/Still waters run deep” near the end.) Skin and his co-host, Ben Rogers, play their parts well, setting him up like a pair of point guards. They both started in bands, so they know the drill. After Skin introduces him as “future royalty,” they guide Alexander from bullet point to bullet point without ever making it seem like they’re merely reciting his biography.

“First and foremost, I am a storyteller,” Alexander says, after talking about influences such as Bill Withers, Kanye West, Tom Petty, and Paul Simon. “I want to put words to music and have people feel the same way that I did when I first learned to strum an instrument.”

After a few minutes, Skin asks Alexander to play “Stay.” It’s breathtaking. Being a foot away from him while he sings makes a soundproof studio seem like a chapel. Apparently that feeling was transmitted through the microphones Gruber set up.

“And so I just got a text, and I’m going to read this on the air,” Skin says when Alexander finishes. It’s from Danny Balis, one of the hosts of The Freak’s afternoon show, The Downbeat, and a bass player. (He’s on Alexander’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” cover.) “He says, ‘Tell that MF’er I’m sitting in my car with tears running down my dumb face listening to this.’  ”

In the weeks to follow, the rollout of SEA/SONS will include a billboard erected by Spotify in downtown Nashville on its release date and an appearance on CBS Saturday Morning, during which he will play “Today,” “Tears Run Dry,” and “Eye Can See” as well as sit for an interview. Later that day, SEA/SONS will land atop Amazon’s Folk Album chart for digital releases, and the vinyl and CD versions will hit No. 8 on the company’s list of overall bestsellers. It will debut at No. 42 on Billboard’s Current Album Sales chart. Reality is starting to catch up with Alexander’s presence. 

He’s ready for where the wave is carrying him.     

This story originally appeared in the June issue of D Magazine with the headline, “Star Turn.” Write to zac.crain@dmagazine.com. Models for the images included Malakhi Kugmeh and Jeremiah Henry. Styling was by J.D. Roeser-Daniels and grooming was by LB Rosser.

The post Podcast: Abraham Alexander Sings Sweetly on Debut Album appeared first on D Magazine.