Love Crushed Velvet Want You To Be A Little Delusional

“It’s hard to get through life without fooling yourself a little bit,” states Love Crushed Velvet singer A.L.X. “If we looked at life in terms of just its core realities, it’s a pretty rough place, or it can be a pretty rough place. I think to get through life you have to have a certain amount of optimism, and some of that optimism comes from hoping that the outcomes in your particular situations are going to be more positive than statistics might suggest they would be. In that sense I think we all have to be a little bit delusional in terms of what we think. It’s kinda what gets us through the day.”

This is the ideology behind Love Crushed Velvet’s new EP, Delusions, which A.L.X. says is introspective on everything from relationships, and breakups, to a conflict in the Middle East.

The sound of Delusions is one of pure rock n roll that will take older listeners back to the 80s. This is due, in part, to the band’s former drummer, Thommy Price, who was Billy Idol’s drummer back in the 80s, and currently tours with Joan Jett and the Blackhearts. A.L.X. remembers their initial collaborations, which gave birth to the band’s 2010 eponymous debut album, saying, “The way that he approached everything, rhythmically, was it all really starts with a groove, and the groove that he put behind everything in all these songs, they ended up feeling like stuff from that era.”

A.L.X. notes that the band, which currently consists of himself, Jay Stone on guitar, Chelsea on bass, and Massimo Majorana on drums, didn’t initially embrace that sound. “For a while we tried to fight it,” he remembers, “but at the end of the day that approach just really suited the songs, so we said fuck it, instead of trying to mask it, let’s just run with it, because the reality is if you’re 16 you’ve never anything like this before. If you’re 35, 40, 45, then this is stuff you grew up with.”


That “fuck it” attitude is something A.L.X. sees in some of the legendary musicians of the past. “If you look at what drove musicians, and inspired musicians, and ultimately made musicians as influential as they were, it was the fact that they didn’t give a fuck about money, they just wanted to get something out. They had to really find a way to express themselves in societies that were much more restrictive than what we have now.”

This, in essence, was why rebellion was always a huge aspect of rock n roll. According to A.L.X., however, rock n roll accomplishing many of its goals has led to the genre now going through the difficult growing pain of looking to find a place in the world again. “In one way the barriers that rock n roll broke down in the 50s though the 70s, and you can even say New Wave to some degree in the 80s, it’s been a victim of its own success,” he explains. “We live in a stylistically more open society than we’ve ever seen in the western world, really, in a lot of respects. We live in an informationally more open society than we’ve ever seen. So what is a genre based on rebellion going to rebel against right now? There’s still plenty of stuff to rebel against, but in a lot of respects we’re so much more unshackled than we once were. You gotta look harder for stuff to rebel against, in a lot of ways.”

With the search for rebellion becoming more difficult, A.L.X. mourns what rock n roll, and music in general, used to mean to the world. “If you look at music as a whole, it, unfortunately, doesn’t have the same level of social relevance that it had a couple generations ago,” he laments. “Right now I’m reading a book about the early days of Elvis Presley, and one of the things that’s so amazing is when his music came out it literally changed people’s lives in the sense that they heard something coming out of their radio that they’d never heard before. They heard this crossover artist who had this amazing energy. You couldn't tell whether he was white, whether he was black, but there was just something you wanted to be part of. He transcended things. In essence along with him, Bill Haley & His Comets, (and) a lot of other acts of that era, it really changed the way society functioned. It opened up doors, it broke down barriers. If you look at the 60s, a lot of the peace movement was driven by music. The 70s, the punk movement gave people a voice.”

Perhaps Love Crushed Velvet will be the band to revive rock n roll, and give people a voice again. Is that going to be difficult? No doubt. Some might even call it delusional. Delusional to think a band can make that kind of impact again. Delusional for a band to play pure rock music influenced by the 80s. As A.L.X. notes, however, “You have to be a little delusional to be successful in life,” and Love Crushed Velvet might be the right kind of delusional to rock the world.


Interview originally ran on Arena.com.