Alex Amen

One Liner: Absolutely beautiful folk like a young John Denver
Wikipedia Genre: Folk
Home: California (via Texas)

Poster Position: Bottom Quarter - Line 25
Day: Sunday.  
Weekend Two Only.

12:15 pm on the AmEx Stage. (brutal time slot)

Thoughts: I want you to just hear this first song before my blathering ruins your first moments with this young man.  "This Love of Mine" with just barely over a million streams.

My goodness.  That is lovely.  Like an early John Denver got crossed with an early Townes Van Zandt after listening to some Jim Croce.  Where in the world did this come from?  Seriously sounds like a lost album from the 70's that never got its due.

For annoying reasons, his website is blocked at my office.  So dumb.  I promise I will not download a virus while looking up an indie musician's bio.  He is originally from Texas, and moved to California at 18 to study filmmaking.  After one semester of that, he dropped out and moved onto the "Dittman Family Commune, a historic commune with ties to the anti-war, civil rights, and psychedelic countercultural movements of the mid-60’s."  He later moved to an island in the Puget Sound, spending years in relative isolation taking up various interests.  He moved back to CA and self-produced some music and started touring.  Not a lot of other background on the guy, but I freaking love this music.

He apparently wrote "California Blues" when he was 14 years old.  I am in awe.  That was his first single, from 2024.  373k streams.

Weird to see a modern truck in that video - since it feels like the song was for sure released in 1969 and later placed on the Forest Gump soundtrack.  Freaking wild, man.  I wanna go camping with those dudes.  Really hearing the John Denver there.  One of my mom's best friends really really loved John Denver, and so I have a soft spot in my heart for him.  Obviously, Country Roads is a jam, and his Christmas album with the Muppets is a nostalgic love for me.  But cool to hear this today. "And Her Colors" has no rhymes and yet really works.

"This Love of Mine" up there was a 2015 single, but for some reason it did not make the 2025 EP called the Zorthian Tapes (while "California Blues" did?).  No real album available on Spotify - I guess he kept his initial self-produced disc to himself.  Jirayr Zorthian was an Armienian-American artist who had a fascinating background - born in 1911 in the Ottoman Empire, moved to America and earned a MFA at Yale, moved to Italy to study art, and then returned to the US in the Great Depression and painted many massive murals like 11 that still stand in the Tennessee State Capitol.  They sort of look like those murals in Pawnee in Parks & Rec.

Stupid weekend two only.  Also, this poor dude will be done before any other artist on the poster even steps on stage.  Did he piss someone off at the C3 headquarters?  That seems weird.