灵格斯在线词典:谁能给我介绍一下Alexis Strum

Alexis的一些小资料
英文名：亚丽克西斯.布莱德尔 Alexis Bledel

生日：1981年09月16日

星座：处女座

身高：5' 7" (1.70 m)

“亚丽克西斯是个天生的演员，当我看到她第一眼我就知道”，曾经和她一起配过戏的演员Kelly Bishop如是惊叹。父亲出生于阿根廷，全家人曾生活在墨西哥，8岁时父母想培养她不怕陌生的个性，所以怂恿她上台表演之后，笑貌恬美的她，迅速被人注意。直面好莱坞影星的瘦身饭桌>>>

2002年她接下了一部由童书改编而成的电影作品《不老泉》，同片飙戏的都是得过奖的实力派演员，包括西席·斯贝西克、威廉·赫特，但她从不紧张，反而让所有观影者刮目相看?导演形容亚丽克西斯有神赐的天使面容，如同从电影里走出来似的。自从她走红，最大的遗憾便是不能回到纽约大学完成学业。

"I don't want to get wrapped up in myself. There's a whole slew of female singer-songwriters going, 'Ooh, I'm so bloody tortured'. 'Oh, I'm in so much pain, la la la'. It's so calculated. Get off the stage."

By rights, 28-year-old singer-songwriter Alexis Strum has had her fill of reasons to go 'Ooh I'm so bloody tortured'. A year ago, for example, she was totally alone. Her boyfriend was moving out and she'd just left a record label without releasing even one note of music. To top it all, the previous month a hair stylist had wreaked unimaginable havoc on her barnet. Catching sight of herself in a rear-view mirror, Alexis was struck by the ridiculousness of it all; this bad haircut that just wouldn't grow out… She swerved to the side of the road and, in the absence of pen and paper, started singing into her phone.

Alexis' debut single is the consequence of those few minutes on the hard shoulder, but instead of wallowing in gloom and solitude 'Bad Haircut' is simply a starkly honest song, warmly reminiscent of The Cardigans and Carole King, about obsession and love. It's evocative and it's funny, and it's all set to an uncommonly irresistible melody with Alexis' expressive and deceptively fragile delivery adding extra depth. You can't help but be pulled in by the song and that, Alexis explains, is the point.

"If you're just writing for yourself, you might as well just stay in your bedroom. Self indulgence is the worst thing in songwriting, and whatever I've done I've tried to make it accessible. Even the saddest songs need some happy moments. Think of 'I Will Survive' - there's pain but there's hope. Someone's fucked you over, but on a lighter note you know they're going to get run over by a car."

Alexis grew up in Chingford, Essex; her parents are both half Polish, with Belgian blood from her father's side and Italian from her mother's. (Mother Strum is also half Catholic and half Jewish which, Alexis hoots, makes for "the very worst guilt you could imagine".) At school Alexis found that being an academic overachiever was the perfect excuse to run amok and never get caught, although some would argue that she got her comeuppance when, during one PE lesson, she was hit on the head with a shot-put. Alexis maintains that it was no accident, but her thick hair, which at that point had arranged itself into something approaching an afro, provided a life-saving cushion. (Good haircut.)

One afternoon a covers band came to school to perform Mudhoney and Nirvana songs. "The singer was gorgeous," Alexis recalls, "but as I stood there gazing longingly at his long locks I asked myself, 'do I want him, or do I want to be him?'" After buying a twenty quid acoustic guitar from Loot, Alexis set out to answer that question. She got together with mates to perform Elastica and L7 songs but her fierce single-mindedness soon prevailed and before long she was experimenting with primitive multi-tracking techniques, pulling off a full band sound in the privacy of her own home.

Later, while studying English ("a complete waste of time") at Kings College, London, Alexis was appointed music editor at the college paper and got a taste for the free music and concert tickets. More importantly, she was already playing her own gigs at acoustic nights, bars, and clubs, many of which don't even exist any more. During this time Strum's Chingford charm came into play. "I was just being really bolshy," she recalls. "I was ringing up places like the 12 Bar club, blagging myself onto the bill and basically lying about what I'd done".

But it wasn't long before Alexis didn't need to lie any more. Session musicians were even recruited to augment Alexis' increasingly popular shows. "I'd earn £50 for the gig, then I'd have to pay my band members," she grimaces now. "I'd end up out of pocket after every gig. I told myself that I'd give it two years."

As it turned out, the two years turned into three years, into four, into five. There would always be some new glimmer of hope - some light where you'd imagine the end of the tunnel must surely be. But each time the light was more like a 40 watt bulb flickering uselessly in the dark. To keep herself afloat Alexis worked in a shoe shop, then threw herself into temping placements where she could email her friends all day. One particularly glamorous winter was spent in a Portakabin on a Docklands building site. Between jobs there were dance records here and there - check the credits on records by people like Thrillseekers and Lange - and a track on Ed Case's 'Ed's Guest List'. The biggest opportunity came with a major label deal in 2002, during which time Alexis wrote an album of electronic modern pop songs so strong that, in 2005, other artists are still fighting over who gets to record them. One of the songs, 'Still Standing' immediately took on a life of its own. It had originally been written with Kylie in mind, and when Alexis recorded her vocals she asked herself, 'How would Kylie sing this?'. It wasn't long before she found out: Kylie plucked 'Still Standing' from the wreckage of what became yet another of Alexis' false starts and recorded the song for her 2003 'Body Language' album.

In 2003 Alexis left London and cleared off to Antigua on a holiday. Much to the horror and general bemusement of her friends she opted to travel by herself, and for two weeks Alexis sat in a hut with no electricity. Covered in mosquito nets and wondering precisely where she was heading in life, she wrote two songs - 'Cocoon' and 'Stay Until Summer'. They were pretty good, so when she got home she produced them up. "I was renting a horrible place in South Woodford - which was haunted - and all I could do was sit there and make music," Alexis recalls. "Nobody was asking me to do it. I had no deal, no manager. But I was, like, 'What the fuck else am I going to do?' When I wrote "Strike A Light" for example, I was there all alone, with "Trisha" on in the background, laying down the keyboard tracks, arranging the cello part. There was no glamour to it, no facade. The songs I was writing were great. I thought that if I could somehow pull it off, I'd get to where I wanted to be.
Which is where she is now. As she rebuilt her confidence, Alexis began pulling the same bolshy tricks she'd used to get on stage at the 12 Bar Club, but this time there was no blagging required. With her songs as currency, Alexis emailed the management of her idol, ubersongwriter Billy Steinberg ("Like A Virgin", "I Drove All Night", "True Colours") in LA and requested that he worked with her. There was no gift of the gab necessary this time - the songs did all the talking. She wanted a classic torch song and "It Could Be You" is the beautiful result of their transatlantic partnership. While remaining in the driving seat, Alexis called on the likes of Magnus Fiennes and Pascal Gabriel, writer/producers she'd worked with for years, to further refine the musical identity of her album; the final three tracks were born.

In the main however, Alexis flies solo, having written and self-produced a significant proportion of her debut album. "Apart from Kate Bush, my heroine, I haven't really got any female producers to live up to which is surprising in this day and age. My A&R guy calls me the 'geek in a nice dress' and he's got a point.

Along with 'Bad Haircut' are a versatile roll call of contemporary, semi-acoustic pop songs, showcasing Strum's extraordinary songwriting, production and vocal flair. Songs like 'Why Me, Why Now', 'Strike A Light' and 'Heart Over Mind' are at once totally conventional in their accessibility and totally unconventional in their execution, as Alexis single-handedly combines her own heartstopping lyricism with the foot-stomping melodrama of a Spector girlgroup. Meanwhile 'Stay Until Summer', whose lyrics are summarised by Alexis as "Basically, 'I'm going to shag you, then I'm going to bugger off'", was written from a man's point of view. ("In some ways," Alexis muses, "I'd like to be a guy...") It's a totally engrossing, hypnotic experience. "The 'if anyone else likes it that's a bonus' stuff - that's bollocks," Alexis states, bluntly. "This is my job. I don't want to do anything else. I'm not leaving. This time, I want people to know who I am."

You can expect to get to know Alexis Strum very well over the next few years. After all, as she admits herself, "I just can't help but write about my life. If there's one thing I'm qualified to talk about, it's that."