Alexander Gallant Serves Up Debut Album: Waiting Tables Blues
WRITTEN BY: Katie Gordon & MITCHELL JODREY // THE BOOM AT NOON
Alexander Gallant (Photo: Nicole Cecile Holland / @nicole.cecile.holland)
On November 3, Alexander Gallant will release his debut album, "Waiting Tables Blues," offering a narrative of his experiences, musical growth and journey back home.
Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Alexander found himself uprooted from his life in Toronto after a breakup. “My mom was living in Hubbards at the time. And it's a small community. So I didn't want to be the guy from Ontario who brought COVID,” says Alexander. “I didn't have anywhere to live because in the past when I would break up with somebody, I'd live on my friend’s couch for a couple of months, but because of COVID bubbles, it was a little harder to just move into somebody's house so I came home and just didn't come back,” he says.
This return home marked a full-circle journey. After high school, he ventured to Toronto and briefly attended university before deciding whether to make it his permanent base. “I was deciding if I was gonna make Toronto my home base or head back here. The roots of what is going on here now, was happening at the time, I felt like I didn't really fit in here and I wasn’t a part of what was going on. I think that was just on me, though,” he says. Alexander lived in Toronto for 11 years. Now that he’s back in his home province, making music and working at Morley’s in Dartmouth. "I feel like I'm part of a community here through the store and through the friends that I've made from here. It’s completely different and I really, really like it."
Between artists from N.S. moving back home or exports moving here for the first time, the pandemic has brought several musicians to the area. “There's a group called The McMillan's Camp Boys. They're great and they're from out west, but they just heard it was cool here and drove," he notes. There's a lot of good folk music happening in Dartmouth and they came.”
Alexander started playing music when he was 12. “I remember thinking that I needed a lane and a niche to be attractive to girls basically, which I think is pretty common,” he laughs. At the time, he convinced his friend to join the class with him. “I made him come and he was really good. I went to his house and I watched him and his brothers all play a song together on drums and bass and guitar and it blew my mind and I was like, you got to teach me how to do music,” he recalls. They then formed a pop-punk band as one did in the aughts.
As he matured, his music taste evolved. “Around grade 12, I got into Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and the big titans of that kind of songwriting,” he says. Following high school, after moving to Toronto, he was without a band and started focusing more on playing guitar. “At that time, somebody showed me, The Tallest Man on Earth and I was like, I could kind of do that,” he adds. “He liked open tunings and that one guy and a guitar thing I was like, alright, that's a lane that I could do.”
Alexander’s influences read like a hall of fame of musical legends: Bob Dylan, The Beatles, Leonard Cohen, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell. Working at Morley's has expanded his horizons further. “For a long time, I would just kind of focus on one record for months at a time, but now that I'm here and working in a record store, it's like this cascade of music because you kind of feel like you have to know a lot about everything and I'm meeting a lot more people who are into music.”
The recording of Waiting Tables Blues came to be when Alexander played a show in Toronto at Tibet Street Records, an artist-run event space, record label and recording studio owned by his friend Brett Paulin. “When I get squirrely and I miss Toronto, I can go up there and do a little show in the studio, which is also an event space and it's a really cool spot,” he says. In spring 2023, He recalls an interaction following a show in the space. “At the end of the night, when you're shaking everybody's hands and everybody's saying good show or whatever, I could see that he [Brett] wanted to maybe say something to me, but we didn't quite get to have a chat,” he says. The following day was Alexander’s last day in Toronto and Brett reached out, inviting him to the studio to record some songs. “The only thing I had planned that day was that I had to meet my friend's new baby at lunch, but I was like okay, I can do both. So I went to the studio and I recorded all those songs in one session with a lunch break to meet the baby,” he recalls. Following the recording, Brett offered to put out the record and produce it.
The songs on the album span a three-year period, with some, like "God's Country" and "Celebrity Chef," being relatively recent creations. “During COVID, I got sober and I started to write like nuts because I didn't have a lot of other stuff going on and I could focus on writing because I had the time and the energy again,” Alexander says. During this time, he estimates he wrote a new song every month, give or take. “The songs are a little bit funnier than songs I wrote with my band and a little bit more direct flow and more lyric heavy,” he adds.
For several years, he worked in restaurants, holding roles as a waiter, barback, bartender and more. “When COVID happened, everybody in that industry kind of was like, alright, you're on your own now until CERB happened. So there was a lot of like, ‘What did I just do for 10 years?’” says Alexander. “It didn’t lead me anywhere good and I was kind of mad that I wasted so much of my time doing it, although everything's a journey to where you end up.”
It’s those experiences that helped inspire Alexander to write some of the songs on the record. “I kind of can sense what I need to write because I start to get a weird sensation. And then I'll just kind of sit down and hopefully find the muse like needling on the guitar,” he says. In terms of lyrics, he draws inspiration from phrases in books, conversations and jokes turned into rhymes. “I have pages and pages of little cryptic ideas, which kind of become collaging. Some work and some don't, but you can kind of build a structure. That's often how it works. Other times I'll just sit down and write a whole song and that's great. I wish it was like that every time.”
The album's lead single, "God’s Country," is a testament to his creative process. After moving back to Nova Scotia from Toronto, he was briefly living with his mom near Hubbards. “It was a great place to be after being locked down in Toronto. There’s eagles and dolphins and it's so majestic and there's fishing boats and stuff, so I sort of had that God’s country line in my head,” he says. One day Alexander put on the radio and a song titled “God’s Country” came on. “The idea of a God choosing this little bit of state where you live as his country is ridiculous to me, so I sort of was like, well, if God's country existed, it’s wherever you are, right? So I decided I was going to write my own song.”
When coming up with a concept for the music video for “God’s Country,” He knew he wanted to have fun with it. “So many videos that you watch are artists being really serious, like ‘look how cool I am in my video…’ and I didn't want to do that. I wanted to have a little bit of a laugh with it,” he remarks. “It’s about a guy who is obsessed with this flower and he's wasted his life trying to find it and what happens when he finds it.”
The official album release for Waiting Tables Blues will be in Toronto on November 3, but you can catch Alexander at The Carleton with Alex Coley & Afterlove on November 16 and the following week at New Scotland Brewery with The Culls on November 25.
