- Yeah, this is from the Troye Sivan album
that I got from EMI in Australia.
I know I like it 'cause it looks
kind of more arty than--
- [Gaby] Than just a plaque.
- Than just a plaque,
'cause that kind of makes me feel a little bit weird.
- You can sort of hide that it's a success marker.
(laughing)
- A little bit, yeah.
(upbeat music)
- [Gaby] At just 24 years old,
Alex Hope has transitioned a love of music
into a career working with artists
like Troye Sivan, Tove Lo, and Years & Years,
as a songwriter and producer.
From Sia to Kesha Lee to Laura Sisk,
there are women occupying
these behind the board roles in the music industry,
but they are way outnumbered
by the men in those spaces.
Still, that hasn't stopped Alex
from doing two of those jobs at once,
for some of the most exciting names in music
changing the shape of pop.
She invited me over to her home studio in LA
to see her process in action.
(upbeat music)
What is the typical day to day for you, like?
- It depends.
So normally, I'll have a session at say, midday, or one.
So I can get up kinda late.
So I do.
- Well, also, your studio's in your house.
- Exactly, so all I need to do is put on pants
and walk downstairs.
So I'll get up at kind of nine or 10,
and then drink a lot of coffee,
try and do emails,
and then I'll kind of go down to the studio,
and start messing around with some ideas
for whatever I have for the artist
that I'm working with that day,
and then the artist or the writer or both
will kind of show up,
and we'll talk about stuff,
and then we see what we wanna write about,
and then we do it.
- [Gaby] It sounds simple enough
when Alex says it like that,
but songwriting can require a lot of emotional labor
and be intensely vulnerable for all parties involved,
especially for the raw, relatable songs
that come out of Alex's sessions.
Her songwriting style was born from admiring
the confessional singer/songwriters
that her parents played around the house in Australia,
like Van Morrison and Bob Dylan.
And further evolved as she discovered
more music on her own growing up.
- I went through different musical stages,
and then I kind of went through my band phrase,
where I was like Blink-182 and all that stuff,
and then I was very obsessed with Jason Mraz,
Sara Bareilles, the Ed Sheeran kind of era.
Yeah, so it was kind of all over the place.
Like my parents didn't really have a genre or an artist,
they just kind of had a bunch of random kind of stuff,
and we would just--
- But those do all strike me as very song based.
- Yeah, I like the song,
I remember when 19, when Adele's album 19 came out,
and I was like, holy crap.
This is wicked.
So I think yeah, it was always kind of artists
that were very heavily involved in the writing process.
You know, I was still in Australia
when Sia kind of started writing over here,
and had a bunch of hits,
so all those people were super inspiring.
It just made me think, oh, cool.
I can try and do that, too.
- Would you say that seeing Sia come up
as a known songwriter was a big breaking point for you?
- Yeah, totally.
Totally, because I mean, I listened to her for years
as an artist back in Australia, her own records,
and so then, seeing her writing Diamonds for Rihanna
or something was just,
I thought it was the coolest thing ever.
- [Gaby] A study of the 600 most popular songs
released in the last six years
revealed that men make up the lion's share
of songwriting credits,
making for a ratio of about seven male songwriters
for every one female songwriter.
For producers, the ratio looks more
like 49 male producers for every one female producer.
Alex occupies the rare space
of both songwriter and producer
because producing helps her protect
the integrity of the song.
She typically hosts writing sessions in her home studio,
which is decked out with instruments,
novelty light fixtures,
and a few commemorative plaques
that she usually keeps hidden,
but reluctantly took out for us.
- I don't know.
I buy stupid things,
and like these little vintage Casio keyboards.
My parents started buying random percussion instruments
for me for Christmas,
from random places that they went.
(thumb piano)
- Have you used any of these in recording sessions?
- Yeah.
I was a bit later into the synth game.
I started on guitar,
and so guitar and bass were my kind of comfort zones,
but yeah, after working on the Troye staff,
and kind of getting more into synths,
I've definitely started a small collection.
(synth)
Okay, so it's got all different
(varied synth)
- Whoa.
- Just all different presets.
- Mhm.
- It's called "mountain."
This is my favorite preset.
(soft music)
- [Gaby] So when an artist comes in here
for a songwriting session,
how does that usually start?
What's your process like?
- We'll normally chat for a bit,
normally ask what's going on with them
or if they have something
they wanna write about in particular,
a concept, or just a feeling
or if they're going through something.
I like working with the artist.
I don't like having too much prepared before
because I feel like sometimes then
they might feel obliged to work on that idea
because, "oh, you spent time making that"
and I'm like, no, no, no,
I'm here to accommodate your project and your art.
I think that's why I feel like
I end up using a lot of artists' demo vocals
that they sung on the day of writing the song,
and we end up keeping those
because even if we try and re-vocal
they're very much in that moment
and you can hear it in their voice
and they had been living that thing
they were writing about
and it just sounds more authentic
than when they try and go in.
It's almost like they know it too well
and they're not in that moment anymore.
- What are some of the fastest songs
that you've worked on?
The ones that came together the fastest?
- Some of the Troye stuff was,
like when we wrote a song called "Fools,"
we'd spend the whole day working on this idea
that just wasn't good
for like eight hours and we're like,
this is terrible, why are we still trying
to crack this thing that's not good?
But sometimes I feel like you need to go through
the not so great idea and bang your head against the wall
and then when you start something fresh
it's like (firework)
and then it just comes really quickly.
- [Gaby] The kind of songwriting
people go to Alex for is personal and specific,
and her unique ability to excavate people's feelings
for public consumption has helped
create powerful songs like "Heaven,"
which revisits Troye Sivan's struggle
with coming out as gay.
Watching her work with other artists
like Daya and Amy Allen,
who were here for today's session,
it's clear that Alex has a great ear,
but what puts her over the edge
as a songwriter is her empathy and flexibility.
- (in unison) Hey!
- [Daya] How are you?
- I'm good, how are you?
- Good, good to see you!
- [Gaby] Why do you like working with Alex?
- I feel like there's not a lot
of female representation in this space
and besides the fact that Alex is wicked talented,
I think it's just important
to bring up other females and to collaborate,
and I think we create some really cool things together,
so it's exciting to work with her.
- [Daya] Every time we work in the studio
it's something new and it's something exciting
and she's very open-minded, which I like with producers.
I don't like when people are like,
"no, this is exactly what we're doing,"
because I like to explore
and find different sounds every day
and I like to innovate and I think
that she's really good at that
and we always make something completely different
than we made the last time.
- [Daya] C, E minor, F, G, B minor, B minor,
somewhere in those chords.
(soft vocals and guitar)
(xylophone)
- [Gaby] The same nine male songwriters
are responsible for roughly 20%
of the 600 most popular songs of the last six years.
But as more young women see futures for themselves
in the examples set by talented songwriters
like Alex Hope, or Starrah, or Julia Michaels,
those demographics should shake up.
- Moving over here and discovering
that it wasn't just Australia that had
a kind of female producer lack thereof,
that it was a worldwide situation.
But it's been funny, I guess
because my name's Alex
- When you read it on a paper.
- Yeah, like I've had people come to the studio
and be like, is Alex here?
And I'm like, that's me.
- How do you handle that situation?
- [Alex] I think it's funny.
I think it's awesome, like, cool.
(Gaby laughs)
- Surprise, you like my work and guess what?
- I'm a lady!
- Is it as stark as those numbers seem to suggest though?
- Mhm. I think so.
I know there's probably thousands
of incredibly talented female producers.
Like when I got into it at 16,
I was Googling producers and I was noticing,
hey, a lot of these names are male,
Like, all of these names are male.
So I think there's just not,
- They're just not seeing themselves.
- They're not seeing it, and then I think
a lot of young girls are like, okay, cool,
well females normally take the singer artist role,
so that should be what I do,
rather than be an engineer or be a producer.
So I think a lot of it is just,
if you don't see it,
- You don't know you can be it.
- Yeah.
(slow trap music)
- [Gaby] What is something that you wish
that you had known as a young person
before getting into the music business?
- I think that it's possible to do it.
I think for a while, I was doing it
but in the back of my mind I was like,
I don't know if this is just a total pipe dream.
I just love helping to get a story
off somebody's chest,
like I love the therapeutic aspect
because then I feel like it doesn't matter
if it gets released or whatever.
It helped that person on that day.
(slow trap music)
- [Alex] This is my favorite thing in the studio.
- [Gaby] Oh my god, what is this?
- When I was six or seven, my dad
wrote Geri Halliwell's autobiography,
from The Spice Girls,
so he was living with her in the UK at the time,
and she would sign t-shirts and make bracelets
and send them back to me in Australia.
I was a huge Spice Girls fan,
so I would wear them
and that's why they look a little bit worn.
- [Gaby] This little baby shirt with a little cargo pocket!
- [Alex] I know.
- [Gaby] So did she draw her?
- [Alex] Geri drew herself.
- (Gaby laughs) this is amazing!
- When I got into music, my mum framed them
and brought them over from Australia.
- [Gaby] This is incredible.
This one's very well loved.
- [Alex] Oh yeah, I wore that a lot.
I wanted to show off at school.
- Yeah, why not?
- And I was like yeah, my dad's friends
with The Spice Girls.
Yeah, I was like, I'm tight with The Spice Girls.
(Gaby laughs)
(slow synth pop)
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