Allie X is the ‘real deal’
Toronto singer-songwriter offers followup to her head-turning 2015 debut
Allie X is the one who got away.
When Alexandra Ashley Hughes ceased performing as Allie Hughes and left Toronto for Los Angeles five years ago, it was entirely our city’s loss.
Adopting the alter ego, Allie X effectively cut any remaining tethers to her indie-rock past and allowed her to become the futuristic electro-pop starlet she always should have been.
Or will be. Allie X’s “CollXtion II “— a completely confident followup to her head-turning debut, 2015’s “CollXtion I” — remains one of the most maddeningly slept-on pop records of 2017. But the latest single, “Casanova,” is gradually worming its way onto Canadian radio airwaves and a brand-spankin’-new hyperballad called “Focus” that will melt your heart arrived June1 as high-profile dates at Lollapalooza in Chicago and L.A. Pride beckon.
Get on it. She’s the real deal. Amazingly, CollXtion II’s — ahem — pop “perfXtion” didn’t come easily to Hughes, who’s penned hits for the likes of Troye Sivan and Lea Michele on the side while still not landing that one radio smash she deserves.
The Star spoke to her awhile back about the difficulties in getting her sophomore record off the ground.
You’ve been talking about this record for a long time, although I guess it was implied that it was coming when you titled the first one CollXtion I.
Yeah. CollXtion II started right after I finished CollXtion I.
I started writing a bunch of new stuff. It was coming together really quickly. I was getting a lot of songs that I liked. But whenever I would try to put it all together on a playlist it would be, like, “This isn’t the record.” … So, a year and a half later, I had 50 demos under my belt and it was the same thing: sonically, it just didn’t have a personality, it wasn’t flowing and I found myself totally exhausted … And so after having enough little breakdowns
I was, like, “I’ve gotta get out of here. I’m just gonna go home, take a break, stop writing, jump in the lake. Just chill for a second.”
Go home to mom and dad. Essentially. And I pretty much stopped. I was still trying to finish some of the older ideas with Mike Wise, who I did a lot of the record with. But even those sessions, it was such a struggle.
In what sense?
There wasn’t the sound that I needed to hear, and I’m sure Mike got really frustrated with that because we’d try endless approaches to the songs and I was always, like, “No, no, that’s not it,
that’s not it.” So I completely stopped.
I played some festivals and stuff, but I just hung out in Canada that summer and kept coming home to my parents’ house and, at the end of the summer, I felt rejuvenated and I started sitting down at my computer and just f-in’ with some new ideas … And then all of a sudden I made a demo of “Paper Love” and I got really excited … I made three of the songs that were my favourites on the record over the course of a week, at least the demos for them, and all of a sudden it all came together in my head, what it was supposed to sound like.
I’m a total sucker for pop music, but I think it takes a certain level of maturity for those of us who move in punk and indie-rock scenes to admit that we love it. When did you finally realize this was your calling?
I knew I had this thing in my head and that I believed in it. I just didn’t know how to get it out. The topic of pop music, as we’re sitting here in Toronto, is particularly interesting because I was always hanging out with really cool indie artists from Toronto — like the Born Ruffians and Tokyo Police Club and Broken Social Scene — and I was listening to all of that and I think I was trying to find my way in that scene, but what I didn’t realize until way later was that I’ve always been writing pop music.
We still don’t hear you on the radio as much as we should.
If I get to the point where I get to be a big radio Top 40 star, I don’t want to get there too fast because I want to have a real following that isn’t, “I listen to Top 40 radio and therefore I’m a fan.”
I want those people like I have right now. There’s a small amount, but they’re very cultish and passionate and very detailoriented, and kind of like the people I’d be friends with, I think.