A fantastical and ominous street scene graces the cover of Shakey Graves’ latest album, Can’t Wake Up. The deeply purple-saturated world is a significant shift from the black and white art of his previous records, and it is a world he literally created. The image is of a miniature set he built. Standing front and center is the man behind the strings and stage name, Alejandro Rose-Garcia.
The art came last in the creation of Can’t Wake Up—a funnel into which all the songs were poured and then melded into a single stop-motion frame. Rose-Garcia says he tries to not let a final image or goal dictate how he currently writes. However, he was interested in making this record feel more colorful than his past ones—hence the purple—and along with this idea came the evocative textures that ripple through the record. “All of that kind of forcefully projects imagery into the brain, which is a very surreal process,” Rose-Garcia says of the layers of sound.
Among those layers are vocals that resemble a modern Greek chorus. On tracks like “My Neighbor,” a myriad of voices provide commentary on current social conflict. Songs that play out like a conversation aren’t new to Rose-Garcia, either. Although Can’t Wake Up departs from the stripped-back folk sound of Rose-Garcia’s previous records in favor of a fuller and even foreboding quality, dialogue is an aspect that runs through his discography.
“I think it has to do with the way that I perceive my interior dialogue, and even just the way that I enjoy writing songs,” he says. The approach allows for shifts in perspective that may give a song new context.
When writing, Rose-Garcia takes his entire discography into account, working with the current album in mind while drawing from older, incomplete ideas. He has a collection of lyrical phrases and voice-memo snippets that he may later build on. Still, he’s working on following his impulses.
“Sometimes, ideas just need to be finished as soon as you come across them. So, I’m trying to find that middle ground to maybe even being more brave and more situational,” he says.
Even without a central concept guiding Can’t Wake Up, Rose-Garcia gravitated toward the world of dreams. The record plays with the lines separating wakefulness, dreams and death, and brings forth the question, “Am I gonna wake up from this?”
The songs “felt like a bunch of little fantasies,” Rose-Garcia says. “[They grapple with] that thin line between a fantasy and sort of a nightmare, obsessing with something until you rub it raw. I didn’t really want it to feel comfortable, per se—it’s an album a little bit about anxiety.”
The important influence of a name is not lost on an artist who works under an alter ego. Rose-Garcia says he even considered releasing Can’t Wake Up under a different name than Shakey Graves. Part of his interest in stage names stems from a Jeff Buckley tour when he played under a number of pseudonyms. And there is another connection between him and the late songwriter. Buckley, who died in a river swimming accident, was found on June 4, 1997—Rose-Garcia’s 10th birthday. As Can’t Wake Up explores, dreams are a fickle, borderless place, but the subconscious is a powerful thing.
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