During the summer and fall of 2020, while staying in her parents home in Central Texas, 20-year-old Lex Walton spent her time watching Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, reading Rimbaud, and watching her friends robotrip on Facebook messenger video call. In this state of isolation, with wounds from a recent breakup still fresh, Walton began writing and recording the songs that would make up her 2020 album SHAME MUSIC. “It is, in a way, a record about transness through its absence, as I was not even really out to myself, and you can hear me sort of try and grasp at things while also being too scared to feel them, and in turn often being dishonest,” Walton says. Four years later, after a prolific run of blistering, innovative singles, EPs, and full-lengths, Walton has released SHAME MUSIC 2, a powerful, self-reflexive experiment in which she attempts to be honest in a way she couldn’t the first time around. Taking four of SHAME MUSIC’s original 10 songs and completely re-envisioning them, Walton has created something bracingly real and inspiring. It’s an album like no other I can think of, where the artist now is in direct conversation with the artist then.
This concept is maybe best epitomized by the music video for the album’s titular track “SHAME MUSIC 2,” a reimagining of the same video for the same track from the original album. In the original video, released in 2020, Walton, in a kind of drab-glamor shot out of a Fassbinder film, sings the intro directly into the camera in front of a black background. When the song’s syncopated, amphetamine beat marches in a rapid-fire procession of images (photographs of friends and heroes, Twitter screenshots, memes, drawings of David Berman, and movie stills) are projected behind her. In the new version, shot earlier this year, Walton is seen setting up the projection and saying, “It starts with the intro for the original, which looks like shit. But we’re all about accepting, accepting the past.” New images have been added to the slideshow, the production has more clarity, it’s harder-hitting, propulsive, and jagged. Walton’s guitar caterwauls and carries a genuine sense of violence and freedom. “SHAME MUSIC 2,” which Walton recorded last fall after a brief stay in a psych ward, includes a new section in which she appears to be addressing her former self, singing, “You’re not as insane as you think you are, though it can be fun to convince yourself sometimes.”
The devastating and sprawling “Take Me From This Corpus Christi Used Car Lot,” is lyrically almost unrecognizable from the original, and acts as the gut-punch confrontation between the two Waltons that closes the record. “How can you be honest with anyone if you can’t be honest with yourself?” Walton asks her younger self. “You are 20-years-old, you are, you’re making me cry. You want to be held.” Here, Walton’s voice breaks. Whereas other artists might risk coming off as cloying here, Walton makes it feel so tender, so real and earned. This kind of examining, self-referential strain often only enters into the works of artists as they get older and have achieved some iconic status (think John Lennon’s “God,” a song referenced on “Corpus Christi”) from which they can sort of look at themselves as characters. But Walton is doing this now, at 24, and in a way that feels hard fought and high stakes, a matter of life and death, a way of forgiving herself and moving forward as a person and an artist.
I met Walton at our local coffee shop, the beloved Cafe Pri in Bushwick, which specializes in Filipino food and Nutella frappes, to discuss SHAME MUSIC 2, the allure of suffering for your art, and why it’s the year of “Forgiveness Rock.”
Matthew Allan: I was reading the liner notes for SHAME MUSIC 2 and there’s this quote of yours that I thought was beautiful. You say, “A work that is for yourself is for everyone and a work that is for one other person is only for you.” I used to have this internal debate all the time, between the “universal” and the “personal” in art. Like, I went through periods where I wanted to make things that were just archetypal, like a Ronettes song or something. I thought that maybe things that were too specific to my experience would alienate people. Then I realized that the stuff I related to most, that felt the most universal, were things that were really specific. Since you’re so honest and revealing in your work, I’m wondering if you ever had that internal debate too?
Lex Walton: I had the exact same thought process. I started out wanting to make Phil Spector music. I wanted to make Les Rallizes Dénudés music. But that didn’t really get me anywhere. The songs weren’t doing anything. But I had that same realization, that the specific is the universal. Because the more specific you are the more feeling is put into the work, and in turn the more someone listening is able to project themselves onto it in a weird way. You write about your own specific experience, your subjectivity, and it then becomes universalized when it collides with the form of pop music.
Matthew: Have you ever had regrets about being hyper-specific and writing so honestly about your life in your songs? Have there been moments where you pissed people off who wanted something to just be private? What, if any, have the consequences been?
Lex: There have been consequences. It started out innocuous enough. But it became partially responsible for, you know, ruining my life. And I’ll leave it there. People can make inferences. In terms of regrets, I don’t know. I would erase every single song I’ve ever recorded if they weren’t really good and if they didn’t mean something to people.
Matthew: Are there things that you would not include in a song, that you would choose to keep to yourself or do you feel like everything is fair game?
Lex: So, one of my things is I always use real names. I can’t do it any other way. I can’t use fake names. It just doesn’t feel real when I’m singing it. So what I’ll do is, if it’s a name that I can’t say, that I shouldn’t say, I’ll sing the name and then bleep it out. And you can hear me do that on I Want You To Kill Me and some other stuff. Because having the emotional truth is more important to me than a phrase being melodically sound or whatever. The name needs to be there. I do think I’m a lot more responsible these days. I’ve gone back, with this new album, to having it mostly be about me and not implicating anyone else. I feel like I have more leniency with other people, but when it comes to myself I have nearly no filter. A lot of songwriters we love, they lie constantly. I can’t do that. I just have a bad self-preservation instinct. I don’t really care what anyone knows about my life.
Matthew: Do you think that has anything to do with growing up extremely online?
Lex: Oh, yeah. I was very isolated. I did a lot of attention-seeking behavior online as a kid. Going on Omegle a lot. I’ve doxxed myself a million times. It’s like breathing to me.
Matthew: On this new album, SHAME MUSIC 2, you’re going back and revisiting some of the songs from the original SHAME MUSIC. Can you talk about making that album and what that time in your life was like?
Lex: So, COVID had happened. I had just gotten broken up with. It was my first relationship ever. It lasted four years. And then my parents moved to Central Texas, like in the middle of nowhere. I was just kind of alone there for a couple months in an empty room. So I was forced to be alone with myself in a way that I hadn’t since I was a kid and I felt compelled to write these songs. That was the only thing I could do. And the key thing about that record is that it was me “figuring things out.” But it’s not. I was lying. I’m telling myself I’m figuring things out but the truth is that didn’t happen until later. I guess it is still happening. But I was struggling a lot. Struggling to piece myself together and figure out what was wrong with me. I was in abject pain. And I needed to get things out as fast as possible which is why the original SHAME MUSIC sounds so bad. It’s a really bad sounding record because I rushed through the mixing. But I’ve gone through a lot in my life since then, and very little of what was happening then is important to me now. But it felt so important then.
And this last year was very turbulent. I was in a psych ward a couple times. I was just sick all the time. I kept thinking about that album. I felt like I needed to ignore what was going on in my life at that moment and try to fix myself by going back further. I had already rerecorded the music for “SHAME MUSIC” and then last fall I was in the psych ward and my dad picked me up and as he drove me back to Boston I wrote all the words for the additional verses of what became “SHAME MUSIC 2.” As soon as I got home I recorded the whole thing in like a day. And then the rest just followed. But I realized what was working best was going back to the songs that really needed a stern talking to. You know, because I’m trying to go back to this kid who’s in a lot of pain and tell her that, you know, things aren’t going to be better but they’re going to be different. “Take Me From This Corpus Christi Used Car Lot” needed so much overhauling, because the original is a completely meaningless song. It’s a stupid song. And I make this proclamation at the end, saying, “I know who I am.” But I was just saying shit. So I needed to set myself straight. I needed to go back and tell myself to shut up and get my shit together. But also forgive myself. You know, this is the year of Forgiveness Rock.
Matthew: I’ve heard you mention this concept, Forgiveness Rock. Tell me about it.
Lex: I’ve been tagging all my releases this year on Bandcamp as Forgiveness Rock, which is my personal genre for this year. I basically have come out of a lot of really difficult interpersonal situations and realized that the only way I was going to get out of this was by forgiving. Because that’s the only way you can get out of anything, I think. And before I could forgive anybody else, I had to forgive myself, right? With SHAME MUSIC 2 I was trying to go back four years and forgive myself.
Matthew: Has that worked?
Lex: I think so. To some extent. I’m doing better than I was.
Matthew: I liked what you said about telling your younger self that things aren’t necessarily going to be better, but they will be different, which is half the battle sometimes. When you’re younger and in certain predicaments it’s hard to remember that shit is gonna change.
Lex: Totally. When I was making SHAME MUSIC I was in the most unchanging, stagnant situation. It was just the same thing everyday in the same place with nobody around. I was very alienated from everything. And that’s really the key difference now is that, you know, I have communion. I’m surrounded by people.Things are still difficult but it’s not lonesome.
Matthew: Yeah. How’s life in New York now that you are here?
Lex: It’s been good. Generally better. You know I’ve been doing so many more shows than I ever have and there’s a lot of people doing a lot of interesting work. Not just in music but across all mediums.
Matthew: I wanted to ask if you see there being any tension between “shame” and making something as revealing and honest as this record? Do you know what I mean? Like, is shame an ally to exhibitionism, or is honesty what you use to combat the shame? Sorry if that’s super convoluted.
Lex: Well, I think I could be very easily categorized as a completely shameless person, right? In the way that I go about my life, the way that I talk about my life. So I think that came from the process of making that first record. It was an attempt to escape shame. But I didn’t fully because there were a lot of things I was too scared to say. That album could be a lot better than it is but I was not allowing myself to say certain things.
Matthew: On “Corpus Christi” you kind of call your younger self out for being a liar.
Lex: Yeah, being a liar. Being a pussy. I was just saying, “get over yourself,” you know? I can’t help but look back at that person and see that person bound by so much that there was no need for. I wasn’t raised religious. When I came out to my parents they didn’t care. I thought they were going to murder me or something. There was no reason for me to be acting that way. I was willingly putting myself in pain.
Matthew: What do you think that was?
Lex: I think I felt like I had to be a suffering artist. Like I had to negate myself and suffer so I could make good art. And I think you might need to suffer to make good art, but what I found out is that you don’t have to do it to yourself, you can just wait for other people to do it to you.
Matthew: I feel like it’s easy to internalize that idea at a young age and even if you realize it is largely bullshit later in life, it is kind of hard to do away with because it becomes so integral to you and it’s like—
Lex: And it feels good. [Laughs.]
Matthew: It does.
Lex: It’s like a drug. It feels good to feel bad and then make art about it and that’s really the problem. You get a dopamine hit from, “I’m such an asshole,” “I’m a piece of shit,” “I hate myself.” Then you write a song about it and it’s really good. So it’s this feedback loop. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we should be writing “Sugar, Sugar.”
Matthew: [Laughs.] I want to!
Lex: Yeah, I wish I could!
Matthew: Yeah, what would the contented, blissed-out Lex Walton record sound like?
Lex: It would probably sound like Artificial Intelligence by John Cale.
Matthew: I don’t get the sense that you’re the type of artist who is going to shoehorn some uplifting moment onto the back half of a record to sweeten the deal, but there is something hopeful or redemptive about “Corpus Christi,” and also heartbreaking. You can hear your voice break at points. Where did you record that vocal take and how did that happen?
Lex: I was in my old house in Roxbury, in Boston. I was up really late and I had written this giant monologue for me to sing at the beginning of the song. Once I started crying, I was like I need to hold onto this, I need to keep crying. [Laughs.] I needed to use that take. I even fucked up one of the lines but I was like, I can’t redo that.
Matthew: In whatever way you can gauge this, how are people reacting to the album so far?
Lex: It seems like its really affected a lot of people, which I’m very happy about. I have a really hard time accepting compliments and I have a hard time seeing how my work affects people. Because it has, you know, it has affected people a lot. But it always feels very difficult for me to see that because it feels like I haven’t deserved it. Or like, who am I to be a figure in somebody’s life? It’s just weird to be a help to anyone in that way when I feel like I can barely help myself. But regardless, it is doing the thing that I want it to do, which is to help people feel less alone. And that’s the most important thing to me. So in that sense, I think it’s been very successful.
Lex Walton will be releasing a single with Ezra Furman on October 23.
(Photo Credit: left, John Pedersen; right, Daniel Dickerman)
