An artist I admire challenges me on the privilege of non-engagement. Alex Wong | MCP #142

Morse Code Podcast with Korby Lenker

I speak with Latin GRAMMY-nominated songwriter, producer, artist, activist, chef and friend Alex Wong about his lifelong evolution as an indie music maker and meaning seeker.

Whether writing and performing his own award-winning songs or producing albums for such luminaries as Vienna Teng and Delta Rae, Alex has always pushed his work beyond conventional ideas of what it means to be an artist. I would even say Alex is one of the most authentically integrated creatives I know. Everything he does is absolutely Alex Wong.

To wit, in 2023 he launched The Permission Parties, a multi-sensory experience where each track from his upcoming album Permission is paired with a Chinese-inspired dish that shares a common emotion.

I attended an earlier iteration of the Permission party series and can attest to both the delicious food and to Alex’s ability to create syntheses of meaning by combining his personal past and his creative present.

It’s always interesting to me to learn why someone wants to write songs, especially songs in the genre loosely called Folk music but which to me means those written from a personal point of view (as opposed to songs expressly created for commercial appeal). We talk about what got Alex into folk and how the twists and turns of his multi-hyphenate career brought him to East Nashville.

The last third of this episode features a challenging, maybe even difficult conversation in which Alex and I get into our different approaches to the cultural problems our time. Here is the backstory:

In March of 2023 there was a mass shooting at the Covenant School in Nashville, where a trans person killed three children and three adults. You remember. Like everyone else, I was shocked and saddened by the murders and so a few days later I joined several thousand of my neighbors at a vigil downtown. I was disappointed in the ceremony, which to me was a lot less about honoring those poor kids and their families and more about using the opportunity to advance a political agenda. I thought it was tasteless and said so in a short piece posted on Instagram. Alex challenged me in a private exchange. That’s the backstory.

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I brought it up in the podcast. It was hard for me to talk about, and I think for Alex too, but it was respectful and ultimately productive and I hope it inspires more such discussions in the future.

It was the most political conversation I’ve hosted on the Morse Code Podcast and it made me reflect me on my conscious decision to stay away from political topics, not only on the podcast, but in my work generally.

I wonder if that choice is the right one.

On one hand, it’s basic to my personality, this desire to bring people together with my writing and music and to point at what we have in common, what you might call the universalities of being human: falling in love, out of love, being afraid to do something and then doing it anyway, getting old, the crazy mystery that is being alive, that stuff. I’m drawn to novels and songs and artists who are similarly concerned. I’ve always been that way, starting with my college days in Bellingham Washington with my bluegrass band The Barbed Wire Cutters when I would look out from the stage and see loggers and college kid protestor types sipping beers and dancing, enjoying themselves together.

It felt like a momentary truce in a protracted war, and one that sowed hope that a future resolution was possible.

Division is the inevitable byproduct of political discussion. Most people don’t seem to mind that, and instead are happy to charge headlong into the us versus them framing of every issue under the sun, from gun control to abortion to free speech to trans issues to the opening ceremonies at the Olympics, with the result that we all very nearly hate each other.

So I think, why add my timid voice to the screaming match? What good would it do?

But there’s another side to that argument, which is maybe best phrased by Plato.

“If you do not take an interest in the affairs of your government, then you are doomed to live under the rule of fools.”

Its an injunction to participate in a field of battle anathema to my very being. I don’t enjoy arguing and I am not one of those people who needs to be right. I just want to be left alone to do my own thing. But that is perhaps cowardly of me. In fact I spend a lot of my free time listening to different arguments on every controversial issue out there, trying to understand both sides of the argument as best I can so that my judgment might be as sound as possible. But I do so privately, for my own sake. Call it part of a lifelong effort to work out my own salvation in fear and trembling.

But maybe that’s a coward’s quest. I think about that. I notice people who put themselves forward for a truth they believe in and I see how they are pilloried and ostracized and ridiculed. Who would want to do that with their one and only life? Answer: people who are called to do it and for whom not speaking up would be the greater sin.

I think about what that would look like to join those actors and agitators, and the prospect is an unhappy one. But maybe I should think again. Maybe a nuanced voice is needed. Ugh. It makes me very uncomfortable to write that. Which is probably a clue.

To bring it back to Alex and to this podcast, maybe there’s a way forward to engage the issues of our time that would be genuinely productive. This conversation is an example of that possibility, and hope.

Interspersed with this discussion Alex and I play two songs, one he wrote for his daughter and one he wrote for the Palestine people.

Find Alex:Website: https://alexwongsounds.com/IG: https://www.instagram.com/alexwongsounds

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