ALEX G CRAFTS A BEAUTIFUL COLLISION OF MEMORY AND MELODY AT THE GREEK THEATRE
Alex G makes me miss my parents. Not because they’re gone (they’re very much alive) but because his songs carry that specific ache of remembering people even while they’re still here. It’s like stumbling on a home video: ordinary and imperfect, yet soaked in a permanence you didn’t know you held. His music leaves room for the unsaid, and at the Greek Theatre, those silences felt palpable.
The night opened with gremlins. The PA coughed, guitars ghosted, the kind of hiccup that can flatten a headliner. Instead, Alex leaned in. He dropped “Sarah” earlier than usual, then “Whale,” both alone in a tight cone of light. The glitch became an opportunity for intimacy. For a few minutes, a 6,000-cap theater shrank to Bandcamp scale – a kid at a desk, double-tracked edges slightly out of tune, and a private thing overheard.
When the band returned, the show widened. Headlights textures bloomed into hi-fi: mandolin sparkle, accordion sighs, and drums built to carry in an auditorium. Yet even as the songs scaled up, he didn’t. From the photo pit, what struck me was how little of Alex we got to see. He kept himself in the shadows, face barely catching a rim light, as if determined to stay half-hidden while commanding the same stage Lady Gaga once blasted open. The darkness read less like a mood than a refusal. Rejection of the spotlight, of the major-label attention that nudged him from DIY secrecy into theaters, and even a second-line spotlight at Bieberchella. The records may have brightened, but the person intentionally stayed dim.
That push and pull shaped the tone of the night. The opening stretch (“Louisiana,” “Gretel”) kept the “I’m writing just for you in your bedroom” charm. Mid-set, the lo-fi aperture cracked open. Into that serrated, character-voice weirdness that first made Frank Ocean pay attention. Then the Headlights run clarified a more polished chapter: “June Guitar” as a grown-up shimmer, “Afterlife” as a hands-on-the-wheel radio singalong, and “Real Thing” turning over the ethics of authenticity and cash. He doesn’t hide this newly found ambivalence. “Some things I do for love, some things I do for money,” he sang in “Beam Me Up,” and in a Live Nation-owned theater, it landed like both a confession and a dare. He knows the major label shine won’t last forever, and he isn’t pretending he doesn’t want the reach.
As the night went on, his playfulness kept colliding with a morose undercurrent. “Is It Still You in There?” sounded like a film-noir score barging into a grade-school chorus—straight out of A Charlie Brown Christmas. “Bounce Boy” chopped folk stems into a skeletal clatter you could almost (emphasis on almost) dance to. If parts of Headlights feel fragile at the edges, that's probably intentional. Childlike melodies smuggled into adult rooms, bright colors painted over hairline cracks, and Christmas lights draping the contours of the stage. It mirrors the youth in the audience – playfully whistling along while knowing full well that the levees are about to break.
The crowd itself was an interesting mix. Elder millennials are still chasing the DIY dream of bedroom indie, still pretending we don’t need to repair that hernia, and teenagers are living that fantasy through their phones. Filming to remember what the remembering feels like. When “Runner” rolled in, both camps lit up. To the kids, it’s a TikTok anthem; to the rest of us olds, it’s Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” with a new coat of paint (not a bad thing). It’s melancholy massaged into an earworm that only millennials instinctively clock.
As a photographer, that near-darkness felt less like a nuisance than expected. Alex was hard to capture, always half-absorbed by the fog and the backlights, insisting the song remain the subject. My shots are mostly fragments: a silhouette framed in lens flare or a triangle of cheekbone washed in blue light. In the best shots, his face hovers on the edge of visibility, rendered more by the negative space and the light bleeding around him.
Alex G has never been about clarity. He lives in the liminal zone where memory, noise, and half-said confessions feel truer than a cohesive narrative. On this night, he turned technical failure into a tiny prayer, lo-fi ghosts into hi-fi hymns, and cartoon brightness into a Trojan horse for heavier meditations. And in the shadows where he kept himself, he reminded me that sometimes the most honest portrait is the one you can’t fully see.
