Alexi Murdoch does his own thing. It just happens to be getting picked up by the mainstream and put on national TV.
In a U.S. tour that includes just six stops before jetting back to destinations like Helsinki and Rome during a two-month period, Murdoch will grace the Fox Theatre with his presence.
And grace is just about the most fitting word to apply to this singer/songwriter, known for heart-tweaking lyrics and melodic lines that call back nostalgia and loss and all those poignant themes leaned on heavily in television dramas, independent films and commercials. Murdoch’s reputation has at least been partially built on placements he’s had nothing to do with. His music has appeared in films and television shows as divergent as Grey’s Anatomy and Real Steel.
“For the most part I’m kind of, I’m a little bit out of the picture — if you’ll excuse the pun — with all that kind of stuff,” he says. “I hear about it because people say, ‘Hey, I heard your song in such and such,’ but, for the most part, I don’t know too much about it.”
And maybe that’s for the best. The epic “Orange Sky,” from the 2002 EP Four Songs, calls forth the drama of a lifetime. It has its own story; it didn’t need Prison Break, or The O.C., or Garden State or Dawson’s Creek — all of which used the song — to give it meaning.
“I think probably if I sat and looked at a lot of the places where the music gets used I might be horrified,” says the man who reportedly spends his free time at his home in Scotland working on a small wooden sailing boat. “In an ideal world, I suppose I would keep the music completely separate from all of that, but it’s not an ideal world. And I guess also maybe I’m not actually that convinced about that, because I think that maybe people have become so used to receiving their music that way that they’ve kind of started to develop an ability to separate the kind of narrative of whatever advertisement they’re watching at the time and the music that’s being used to kind of facilitate that. … So I would hope that the music kind of comes out mainly, for the most part, unadulterated by the whole process.”
And there are worse fates than having his songs appear in an advertisement — like actually having to advertise for himself.
“I find that way too embarrassing,” he says. For an artist who has been self-released from the start, these spots have eased his way into sold-out concert tours. And while he’s stayed self-released to protect his artistic priorities and allow for a slow, methodical process, he mixed the procedure up for his latest record, Towards the Sun. Much of what went on the record came from a single session of recording with a tape deck.
“It was completely different from the previous effort in that the previous effort was this kind of long, drawn-out battle,” he says. “This time around, I was just convinced I wasn’t going to get into that kind of quagmire again.”
He hadn’t planned to make a record, just to commit some ideas to tape. When he reviewed it later, he found himself “pleasantly surprised to find that there was something kind of very true to me about how the songs sounded.
“Obviously in this day and age, it’s become sort of standard to expect people to sort of, you know, crank out stuff every year,” he says. “But I guess when you step back from it and realize, it’s not like we’re in desperate need of another album, you realize that, in fact, you have to just kind of give into the process and focus more on what you’re going to put on the record rather than just making sure you have a record out there every year.”
Despite tortuous spaces between records and next to no self-promotion (his Twitter feed is thin, to say the least) Murdoch’s U.S. tour is nearly sold out.
“It’s always a real surprise to me,” he says. “Every time I go out on tour, I’m always very skeptical about the whole process, and I always assume that nobody’s going to show up.”
What he has to guess, he says, is that those other media, the television shows and movies, have drawn the people to the music.
“I don’t feel like I’ve kind of used some kind of method to pull people in,” he says. “It feels like the music has kind of gone out way ahead of me and done that work for itself.”
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On the Bill
Alexi Murdoch plays the Fox Theatre on Wednesday, Oct. 26. Doors at 8:30 p.m.
Tickets are $20 in advance, $25 day of show, with a $2 fee for being under 21.
1135 13th St., Boulder, 303-443-3399.
