It’s Alex Aiono’s year and that’s a fact. The 23-year-old singer-songwriter may have gotten his start by way of covering songs on YouTube, but these days, it’s the original tunes that he has written, which are propelling him to stardom. The talented musician just wrapped up a nationwide tour where he dazzled audiences across the country with songs both old and new! Now, as he embarks on his next chapter, he took a few minutes to reflect on his all-star year in an EXCLUSIVE interview with HollywoodLife.
“It’s bittersweet,” Alex says of his tour which is coming to a close. “I’m happy that the intense amount of focus and drive and waking up early and going to bed late and burning the midnight oil, I’m very happy that that’s over, but at the same time getting to finish the show in New York City and seeing how amazing the crowd was and how amazing the crowds have been this whole time — it sucks that I don’t get to keep on playing this show. I don’t feel like I’m ready to finish,” he told us the day after the tour wrapped on June 26.
Aiono fans who flocked to his tour shows were in for a treat, especially thanks to his latest single, “Unloving You.” For Alex, the breakup ballad was penned about a romance that was all too real. “Man, it was really me and one of my closest friends, and we were sitting in a hotel room,” Alex explains. “I had just been in this funk of not being able to get over this girl, and we were sitting in a hotel room, and we just kind of started breaking out guitars and writing about how I actually felt at the time. When we played it from start to finish…we were both were choked up and we knew that it was special.”
As fans know, the track received a corresponding music video, which featured a familiar face – American actress and social media superstar Andrea Russett, 24, who was tapped for the clip. Alex says she couldn’t have been a better fit. “When my team asked me about who I thought should play the love interest in the video, my first thought was Andrea for multiple reasons. One, because everybody was already speculating and starting to put us together, but on top of that — Andrea’s also a public influencer. She’s gone that route. She lived the story that is the music video, and I’ve also lived the story that is the music video,” Alex describes for us, the moving visuals in which a budding relationship is portrayed in a series of texts, Snapchats, and Facetimes –a clear nod to the way the digital age has shaped modern day romance. “It hit home for both of us,” Alex said about making the video with Andrea. “The story got told even better than we thought it would!”
As if the past six months haven’t been impressive enough, Alex teased more about what will come in the year ahead and added that he’s cooking up a few things that fans would never expect from him! “This has been my favorite tour, my best tour, best outcome, best fans, best time of my life, and it’s still not going to be the end of 2019. We have so much more coming, music and stuff you would never even expect me to do. It’s going to be absolutely insane,” he teased.