by Daniel Colussi | Alex Bleeker’s main gig is playing with Ridgewood New Jersey transplants Real Estate, a band that specializes in a very distinct kind of autumnal, melancholic pop music. Real Estate are great and I love them, but when Bleeker surrounds himself with The Freaks a different spirit takes hold, something ancient and unbound. They’re privy to something special. I’m talking about the timeless magic that occurs when people get together and let the music take over. That’s what Alex Bleeker and The Freaks are about, continuing a lineage that goes beyond fashion and nostalgia. And I think that’s what Alex is like as a person, too, because despite my efforts to tether Alex to being a Deadhead or How Far Away to being a break up record he always outplayed me simply by being honest and forthright in his answers. Imagine what happens when this guy straps on a guitar! Alex Bleeker and The Freaks have the songs and the chops and I expect them to slay the Astoria on tonight (Friday). Between now and the show take a minute to meet Alex Bleeker.

I understand that How Far Away was a labour of love. Why did it so long to complete? Yeah, well…I was doing it in the middle of heavy touring for Days which wasn’t really ideal so there are a lot of different people that play on the record, there are three different drummers. It was a pretty disjointed recording process, but then I was able to do a final push a get a lot of the final stuff done because Real Estate came off tour and I had more time to dedicate to finishing the record. It was not ideal for me, honestly. Any album that takes two years to make – I think that’s sort of ridiculous. It’s like my Chinese Democracy*. You lose some sense of cohesion of that much time, but that being said I think we did a good job of pulling it all together because I did have that dedicated time at the end of the process.

It plays cohesively to my ears. And feels somewhat thematic. It’s got a kind of morose vibe… The biggest mistake I made was letting that one-sheet go through! My friend Sam wrote that and I love him and I like his writing and I trust his opinion, but it was almost his reading of the record, not actually mine. Which I thought was cool, because when I read it I took it as how Sam hears the record, but I guess I didn’t realize how much of an impact the one-sheet has on all the press that gets written, particularly to the point where some people just copy and paste it to their blog or their website. So what Sam actually says is that this is not a break-up record — that’s what he says, but everything that’s been written about it is says that this is a break-up record! I guess because when you says that something’s not something then you’re automatically saying that it is something. It wasn’t a conscious theme; I didn’t want to make a song-cycle, thematic record about the end of a relationship and moving forward, but there’s some of that in there for sure. I won’t deny it. But that wasn’t the idea of the record. A lot of people write about that kind of thing all the time. My first record is all sad love songs, for the most part. So I don’t see it as a break-up record, as if I was trying to make a Blonde On Blonde kind of thing.

So the record took a long time and a bunch of different people played on it. What about this current five piece touring line up? Does this feel like the definitive Freaks line up? Yes, I finally found it. The band right now is the band. It came together in January. We were almost there – four fifths of us were in – and then we swapped out drummers and everything really…we just knew after that. So this is really the first time that I feel like we’ve got a real band. It’s not just me and whoever I scrape together, which is what it was for a lot of years. I feel really good about that because we can practice and change and work on new songs together and the next album will be this band working together. We get along really well and we play well together. It feels really good.

So you’ve been able to stretch out at shows and feel it in the songs? Yeah, yeah, definitely. We play to the circumstances of the room a lot. We played in a bar next to a bowling alley in Detroit a couple of nights ago and so we did a rock show with pop songs. And then we’ve had other shows where we stretch out and see how far we can push this one song in a certain direction that we’re already moving in. There’ll be improvisational passages where we can go a little further, a little deeper. There was a great show in Chicago that I mentioned, a packed sweaty warehouse and it was a total party and the people were enjoying what we were doing. Every room is different, and in this band it’s really fun because we can play sort of differently depending on where we’re at. In Denver we’re playing a sort of non-traditional venue, it’s more of a bar/restaurant, and so it’s like we’re on from 10 until 1 in the morning, but we’re all really excited about it. We’re going to stretch out every song; we’re going to play every song we know. That kind of thing keeps it really exciting.

That’s cool. I feel like there’s not a lot of bands in the general indie-circuit-milieu nowadays that can play that way show to show, adjusting to every room. And that kind of leads in – I don’t want to harp on this too much – but I understand that you’re something of a Deadhead? Yeah, I’m a really big fan [of The Grateful Dead] and that’s where that ethos comes from a bit. It’s not really something exclusive to the Dead. I’m just really into them at this juncture in my life, so it’s fun to lean on that a bit. And it’s fun because treating each show as something unique and a different experience is equal parts Grateful Dead and Velvet Underground to me, or Neu for that matter.

Ok, quickly tell me about interviewing Lindsay Buckingham — that must’ve been pretty awesome. It was insane. It was amazing to talk to him. I got this opportunity through a friend and it was incredibly surreal because I’m a big Fleetwood Mac fan and also a Lindsay Buckingham-solo fan also, so it was really cool to talk to someone like that who’s so mythological. But he was really cool and down to earth on the phone and not condescending, not shocked to listen to a young person. He was self aware and down to earth at the same time. It was great for me to do that.

Alex Bleeker and The Freaks with The Shilohs and The High Drops at The Astoria Friday August 9th. Tickets at Zulu and the door.

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Daniel Colussi is the Music Editor of Scout Magazine and a contributing writer to Ion Magazine. A veteran employee of Zulu Records and tuneage aficionado, he DJs on an infrequent basis (about four times a year) and is a musician around town who plays in several ensembles.