Strawberry Guy

The music of Strawberry Guy sounds familiar. Not that l can put my finger on it. It is nostalgic. Comfortable. Not boring, somehow peaceful. Sun Outside My Window taps into a universal condition that echoes a laziness that some of us want more than we have.

Strawberry Guy, Sun Outside My Window. Image of single video.

Liverpool based solo musician, Alex Stephens goes by the name, Strawberry Guy. With a background in The Orielles and Trudy & The Romance, his introspective music flows, reminding me of Swedish musician, Jose Gonzalez.

Sun Outside My Window is the first album by Strawberry Guy and was released in 2021. It is a super consistent album. No bad tracks and in fact it is a whole album, not a collection of singles and in that way it is a little old fashioned. Maybe that is partially where the nostalgia comes from. The album sounds like something old people used to listen to. Joke. There is also a landscape quality to the music of Strawberry Guy. I think it (the music) might be perfect whilst cruising through the country on sunny day. Strawberry Guy seems to draw on landscape and painting through the visual representation of his music, be it the video of Sun Outside My Window or cover art for singles Company or Taking My Time To Be. Like painting, his music has a palette. Light and shade. Ebbs and flow. Beat and drifts knit the sounds. Think of old school painters like Turner and Constable, with technology, and you start to get the picture (pardon the pun).

Sun Outside My Window, cover art.

The music is cinematic too; its visual. Film scores seem an obvious choice. As We Bloom must be in a film somewhere but l just do not know where. A White Lie is dusty; a dusty, old piano. When Morning Comes is spatial and expansive. At times dream-like, sleepy, Sun Outside My Window is often other worldly.

S.W