Alex Isley Teases New Music, Summer Festival Performances & More
R&B and soul singer Alex Isley has been surrounded by music her entire life. Her father Ernie Isley as well as her uncles O’Kelly, Ronald, and Rudolph, consisted of the legendary Isley Brothers. Alex spoke about how music has been embedded in her DNA.
“Music has been second nature from the time I was born. Before I was born, my mom would play music around her belly,” she says adoringly. “It was just the force that was inevitable as I was surrounded by it on my dad's side, of course. But then on my mom's side, my grandmother sang opera, and then my grandfather was a jazz aficionado. He had tons and tons of records. That's all he played. So, I was just surrounded by it at all times.”
While Alex comes from a legendary family of artists, she has paved her own way in the industry. Alex already has released three albums, had a guest role on Issa Rae’s Insecure, and of course, secured her first set of Grammy nominations this year. Her velvety vocals on Robert Glasper’s “Back To Love” -- which also featured R&B singer SiR -- gave the Los Angeles native her first shot at the coveted golden gramophone.
“So for ‘Back to Love,’ Robert [Glasper] has become a big brother of mine, especially over the pandemic. He would send ideas to me and I recorded vocals for it, and it ended up becoming the theme for the ‘Run the World’ series that was on Starz,” Alex recalls of the television show that aired from 2021-2023 starring Amber Stevens West, Andrea Bordeaux, Bresha Webb, and Corbin Reid.
Alex then reminisced on the recording process of “Back To Love” which took place over the 2020 pandemic.
“I recorded it at home and thankfully I had the tools to do that. I mean, working with him is always such an honor. So I did that at the end of 2020 and sent it back. It became ‘Back To Love’ and being nominated for it was just like an out-of-body experience to hear my name called. That was very, very, very surreal. I was just overwhelmed with gratitude that day,” she quipped.
Alex Isley Teases New Single For This Summer
The Los Angeles native’s latest releases have been 2022’s Marigold with Jack Dine and the following year she released a jazz collab album with Terrace Martin titled I Left My Heart in Ladera. She also is featured on Destin Conrad’s “Same Mistake” which was released back in January. While Marigold is more R&B with features from Bas and Glasper, Alex is not shutting down the possibility of putting out another jazz-focused project in the future.
“R&B is the first natural instinct for me but I would absolutely love to do another jazz project. I have been thinking about doing some sort of project with standards because I'm singing jazz standards. At one point, that's all I was singing. When I was in college, I was a jazz studies major, so that was really the bulk of everything. I would love to consider that and maybe put that together sometime soon.”
This summer, you will be able to hear Alex perform live at The Recipe festival in July in London and then she’ll be back here in the States at the Newport Jazz Festival in Rhode Island the following month. For The Recipe, Alex previewed that she will be incorporating “a little bit of old, a little bit of new, perhaps something unreleased.” As for the Rhode Island festival, the singer says she will “definitely be incorporating some jazz” into her set as a way to pay homage to the great jazz musicians before her. However, in case you won’t be able to catch Alex live this summer, the singer has something up her sleeves that fans have been waiting for.
“So I do have a single in the works,” Alex excitedly responds. “I would say mid-summer, definitely before August. I've been in such a creative inspired space. I've been writing a lot, and I feel like more consecutively in this past. In this past year, I've been writing and brainstorming a lot so I'm excited to share more new music this time. But, yeah, new single on the way.”
You can keep up with music updates from Alex on Instagram, and all of her music is available to stream on Apple Music, Spotify, and Tidal. Take a look at Beyond The Record's podcast episode with Alex below. You can listen to the interview on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube.