Born in Los Angeles but mostly raised in Austin, McArtor first merged her love of music and film around the age of 14. “When I started writing songs, I’d always write with movies on in the background,” she says, listing Blue Velvet, Trainspotting, and Velvet Goldmine among her go-to films at the time. “I’m a very visual person, so movies or visuals help me to create the world in which a song lives.” Around the same time, she began playing piano and guitar, and soon came up with “Party’s Over”—a slow-building and stormy piano ballad that eventually appeared on her debut EP Spoken Word (a five-track effort released in July 2019). With her follow-up EP Heart Talk Vol. 1 arriving in October 2019, McArtor has maintained her visually driven approach to songwriting, and now often finds inspiration in her own photography. “I’ll pull up some photos or a little film of something random like ballerinas dancing, and it just brings me into a whole different headspace,” she says.

For McArtor, Welcome to the Wasteland ultimately serves as an expansive and multilayered ode to her teenage years. “I feel like I’ve gotten closure on that time in my life, like things have come full circle, and now I’m free to move on,” she says. And as her most ambitious and elaborately realized work to date, the project has helped immensely in clarifying her intentions as an artist. “Making this EP reminded me how much power there is in writing songs, how your lyrics and the sound can create a whole world, almost like a coping mechanism,” she says. “I want to continue doing that, and get better and better as I progress and experience more of life. It’s amazing to me that I can show people this world inside my mind and welcome them into it, and hopefully give them some kind of comfort and escape.”

Text taken from her site: https://www.alexmcartormusic.com/bioofalex Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.