Alex Dupree is a songwriter based in Austin, TX. He released his first album in 2005, a piece of shambolic bedroom folk made with a group of friends called the Trapdoor Band. NPR called it “both poetic and political.” Over the course of three LPs with this group, and one under the pseudonym Idyl, Alex would root himself firmly but idiosyncratically in the traditions of American songwriting. “Sounds continue to unfold in ways that are timeless,” one reviewer wrote for Yahoo! Music’s Top 100 Albums of 2007, “Dupree just needed to discover them and dust them off.” During this time, he was also recording and touring extensively with Zookeeper, the folk-rock zag of emo pioneer Chris Simpson (Mineral).
In 2013, Alex moved to Los Angeles to study poetry, but songs were never far from his mind. He still wrote and performed with cosmic country bands Mister Paradise and Dawn & Dupree, leaning into a Willie Nelson-tinged croon for the bar crowd. He returned, more or less, to his own voice for 2017’s You Winsome, You Lonesome, put out on cassette by Keeled Scales. A full release with the label never materialized, and after some time floating between odd writing gigs, he returned to Austin.
Along the way he met Phoenix-based producer Michael Krassner (Boxhead Ensemble, Simon Joyner, Califone). Their collaboration resulted in the 2022 album Thieves. If You Winsome, You Lonesome is a suite of country storytelling (seen through the hazy marine layer of indie rock), then Thieves has narrative folk ballads at its heart. In the words of a UK reviewer, Alex is “a magician pulling the strings, sometimes a director setting the scenes” for these campfire stories of “caves and gangsters, bodies and bad guys, untrustworthy divas and the search for true love.”
You Winsome, You Lonesome got a belated vinyl pressing in 2024, commemorated by a 22-date tour of Texas. Alex’s second album with Michael Krassner, Talking to the Dog, is scheduled for release in 2026.