Alexandra Beck looks at love from both sides now with her double-sided debut single Blemished and Blew It — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
“This collection portrays the two extremes that love can make us feel,” the soul-pop singer-songwriter shares. “I wanted to show how, one day, a person experiencing romantic love can feel completely and utterly euphoric and, the next day, the extreme pain of loss.”
The two releases — smoothly packaged as Blemished — swiftly showcase the Saskatoon-born Vancouver artist’s dynamic range. Produced by award-winning hitmaker Roy “Royalty” Hamilton III, Beck penned the cuts during a songwriting workshop with Jud Friedman (Whitney Houston). “Our co-writing group envisioned writing a feminist love song,” she recalls. “My co-writer Jake Perry came up with the guitar chords and I created the hook melody over them. Next, I came up with the concept that my boyfriend sees the Blemished side of me; historically, women were considered ‘blemished’ if they didn’t correspond to stereotypical gender roles. So in this song, it’s a feminist boyfriend who takes me for who I am as a strong woman with dreams and career goals, and doesn’t try to change me like so many romantic partners of women try to do.
“For Blew It, my goal was to write a simple, yet powerful, pop ballad many girls who have given all they’ve got to love — and then lost it — could relate to,” she continues — adding she didn’t have to look far for inspiration. “This was a song I wrote in one night when I felt extreme pain losing someone who I thought, at the time, was the love of my life. I remember sitting at my piano at my old apartment and deciding, ‘OK, I’m gonna sing all my feelings out and write songs until I’ve healed.’ (My ex-boyfriend) had ended things so abruptly that he said ‘I expected you to throw acid on me tonight’ the night he broke it off. ‘No, honey,‘ I told him, ‘the acid is only for the songs.’ And Blew It is definitely one of my more acidic songs.”
Hear for yourself. You can listen to Blemished and Blew It below, and follow Alexandra Beck on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
