Alexandra Savior

Alexandra Savior exists between planes. Sonically, she floats between genres. Her voice—tender and textured—grabs hold of each note, carrying her words from place to place. Lyrically, her songs unfurl their rich narratives, sticking themselves to your brain like putty. Repeated listening rewards you with turns of phrase and well-trod storytelling, revealing Alexandra’s savvy perspective as a writer, rooting her songs in experiences so deeply personal that, upon refraction, could only become infinitely relatable.



All this and more awaits you inside the eaves of Beneath The Lilypad, Alexandra Savior’s new album, a collection of 11 lushly orchestrated tales crafted over the past five years. Begun during the pandemic with her partner, producer Drew Erickson, Beneath The Lilypad is an ethereal journey through Alexandra’s state of being over the past half-decade, a time in her life during which her sense of self and artistic identity both came into question.



Alexandra first began singing in high school in Oregon, nurtured and influenced by a rock-loving family who’d keep records by the Velvet Underground, the Violent Femmes, and Tom Petty in steady rotation at home. As a preteen, a deep dive into the music of Nina Simone and Billie Holiday helped her sharpen and shape her taste. “I’d try to sing exactly like their every inflection, to a T,” she remembers. “I was 12, and I’d listen to their songs a hundred or more times to get it exactly right.” When her school eliminated its musical theater program, she and a friend found other ways to keep creative; her friend would play piano while Alexandra would sing. They recorded some videos of their at-home sessions and uploaded them to YouTube, and before long, a manager came calling. She was 17, visiting New York City, meeting major labels, and chasing newfound dreams.



But following two albums—2017’s Belladonna of Sadness and 2020’s The Archer—she felt creatively adrift, she says. It was “almost dreamlike as I wandered through this haze of figuring out who I was and what I wanted, after years of feeling like the softer, more emotional, more feminine side of myself and my music was weak.” Yet she also learned that “instinct is more powerful than any of the doubt in your own head,” a driving force that helped propel her songwriting process for Beneath The Lilypad. “This time around, I wasn’t thinking about how the music was going to be perceived. It was almost like I was able to just make it for myself, the way I wanted, instead of the way I thought anybody else might want it, which was so freeing.”



That freedom ripples throughout the album, on songs like “Unforgivable,” the first track listeners are greeted with. “That was one of the first instances of me learning to live outside of that ego place, of trusting someone else—Drew in this case—to help get me and the song to where I heard it in my head,” she says with a laugh. The song followed a FaceTime session with her therapist, after which she ran to write down lyrics while the feelings were fresh. “If you listen to the song, we’ve all had experiences like this as women—it’s universal!—so I wanted to approach the song from that POV, to be able to speak to a lot of people and have it be both serious and tongue-in-cheek at the same time so we could all open up a conversation about misuses of power while not feeling exhausted while talking about them.”



Deeper into the album, singles like “The Mothership” and “Goodbye Old Friend” fill out the pages of her chapters, the former speaking to her tether and tenderness to her partner as she struggles with her mental health and a bipolar diagnosis, while the latter does a post-mortem on a relationship by taking a look at the role she herself played in its conclusion. “All of the Girls” came about during a period when Alexandra was “really into Rosemary’s Baby” and came out of a particularly doom scroll-y moment in the pandemic of comparison to other women on social media. There’s even a link to demos past in “Let Me Out,” a song she’s had percolating in one form or another since her first tour, which finally felt right to re-approach and strip back for this record.



Beneath The Lilypad, Alexandra is quick to note, does not tread a linear path—its arc does not follow an artist from difficult times to fully healed. “Because that’s not how life goes, and that’s certainly not been true of my mental health journey,” she says with a knowing laugh. “I wanted the tracking of this album to really reflect that. Life is up and down. Things have gotten better, and they’ve dipped. It wouldn’t have been true to who I am or where I am to have told this story any other way.”