Tuesday by Joshua Alexandre

July 20th, 2021 was a pretty average day for me. It was a Tuesday. I went to work in the morning, commuting by Skytrain. After work, I met my buddy Adam at a local brewery and we chatted about how John Horgan seems like he’d be a real grillmaster, a real barbecue dad. I commented on how that would make for a good song. From there we walked down to our evening beach volleyball game, noticing several blackberry bushes along the way. At volleyball, I grumbled and complained about everything from the sand, to the other players, to the hot sun. Afterwards, my friend Paul offered to drive me home – even though it was out of his way; I said it was fine, but he insisted. When I got home, I took a bath. Then I went to bed.

The next day, I was so inspired by the events of the previous day (touch of sarcasm here), that I decided to embark on a songwriting project: a concept album that I would title “Tuesday”. Rather than trying to write music and then lyrics, or both at the same time, I wrote out song titles and lyrics first. After coming up with 11 track titles, I went through and wrote lyrics – mostly just a literal retelling of the previous day’s somewhat mundane events. Over the course of the next year I would sit down with the different lyrics I wrote, sometimes with a genre or specific style in mind and sometimes not, and write music to them. From there, I would record what I had. Before long, I had all 11 songs written and recorded. Not knowing what to do next, I approached my good friend Bryan to ask if he would be interested in helping me mix the songs. He went above and beyond: adding and re-recording parts, mixing, and mastering the entire project. Not to be outdone, his wife Katherine created the album art.

This was always a labour of love. Too often as a songwriter I get stuck on the lyrics; I get hypercritical of what I write and eventually just give up. With this project I decided to remove that obstacle, I created a songwriting space where all I needed to focus on was the music itself. It was an enjoyable process, something that reinvigorated me as a songwriter. And then, to have a great friend come along for the journey and help shape and polish the songs was the cherry on top.

Anyway, here is Tuesday. I hope you like it, or parts of it, or maybe just the idea of it. And if you do like it and are yearning for more, fear not, because Wednesday is already well on its way.

Joshua Alexandre is a musician based out of New Westminster, BC.