On Comparisons With Courtney Barnett, Her Writing Persona & Hating Uni

Since her single You Don't Think You Like People Like Me received a Best New Track nod from internet overlords Pitchfork in June, things have moved fast for Alex Lahey. She's released her debut EP, B-Grade University, played Splendour In The Grass, charmed all at BIGSOUND, signed publishing and booking deals overseas, and, just three weeks ago, quit her day job. The 24-year-old Melburnian is grateful for every bit of the Next Big Thing buzz, but is a little more conflicted with all the Next Courtney Barnett talk.

"Courtney is one of my favourite artists," says Lahey. "I think she's brilliant. And I'm humbled to be compared to her. But if I wasn't a girl who played guitar with brown hair, I don't think that comparison would be around at all. I don't think it's musical comparison at all, I think it's a purely aesthetic thing."

"I'm a pretty direct and dry person. I like to think I'm funny, I don't know if I am."

Lahey's music is more direct — driving, poppy — but she shares Barnett's lyrical fondness for humour and hard nouns. B-Grade University is a wry portrait of post-uni malaise, the early-20s angst of relationship/career unsureness. "The EP is quite cohesive, but that's totally accidental. That accidental cohesiveness just comes from the fact that the same person wrote all the songs, as they were going through this one particular phase in their life," Lahey offers.

"I'm a pretty direct and dry person. I like to think I'm funny, I don't know if I am. I feel like my voice comes through in my lyrics. When I write it's my voice, it feels conversational, that's just how I talk. Alex Lahey isn't a persona. It's my performing name, now, but it's also my real name. When I first started this project, I remember saying: 'what name am I going to perform under?'; and people said to me: 'obviously your own, because these songs are so reflective of you'. Some people are really great at taking on a persona, or having a pseudonym and becoming that character, but my music is just totally reflective of who I am."

Lahey grew up in Melbourne and began playing music by picking up the saxophone at 13; she'd go on to play in big bands at Wesley College, then study jazz at Monash, before dropping out. "I had a fuckin' blast in high school, but I hated uni," she says. Eventually she got an arts degree, but Lahey's great education came in her first outfit, Animaux, a brassy big band in which she sang and played alto sax. "I always say that I learnt far more in the School of Animaux than any uni could've taught me," Lahey says.

Lahey began writing songs as a 13-year-old as a way of teaching herself to play guitar. But her solo songs were, for the best part of a decade, secondary to playing and studying jazz; Lahey seeing an irony in the way all her youthful dreams have come to be in an unexpected fashion. "It's funny that it's all manifested itself in a career in rock'n'roll," she laughs. "And, that's rock'n'roll in air-quotes."