Singer-Songwriter · Guitarist
Alex
Perez Jr.
Norfolk, Virginia
Est. 2018
Independent
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Alex began writing "If They've Hurt You" on a plane during the COVID era. When he returned to the song years later, its meaning had grown with him — shaped by the difficult realization that some relationships can no longer remain part of your life.
Tender but clear-eyed, the song is about recognizing when love has become hurt and finding the strength to part ways. It holds space for what once mattered while choosing the freedom to live again.
"I Want To Talk Again" was written in 2021, when Alex was 16, as a way of making sense of how alcohol and substances can change someone you love into someone you barely recognize. The song lives in the painful space between being hurt by a person's actions and knowing those actions may not reflect who they truly are.
Alex calls that transformation "the hatred demon" — a force that seems to take hold of someone familiar and turn closeness into distance. Intimate and unguarded, the song is a folk-acoustic reflection on loving someone through that change, and on the quiet hope beneath it all: the wish to reach the real person again.
"You Missed Out On Me" was written about someone who was supposed to be there but wasn't. It began as something deeply personal, but Alex sees it differently now: "I want it to resonate with people in the way they see fit. Whether it's a girlfriend, a friend, anyone you've felt that way about. Something so sad can be turned into something so beautiful."
Recorded in his dorm room at Middlebury College in Vermont, built entirely in GarageBand — acoustic guitar woven with carefully stacked vocals that create something genuinely intimate. The album cover? A photo Alex took himself while walking through Fornebu hovedgård in Norway, during a semester abroad in Copenhagen that changed his life.
Alex Perez Jr. started really taking music seriously at 13, listening to Jim Croce and Maury Muehleisen — an iconic folk 1970s duo. Their sound made him pick up a guitar. The summer of 2018, his great-uncle gave him a Guild classical guitar from the mid-1960s, and Alex couldn't stop playing.
On April 12th, 2019, he got up in front of his entire school — a nervous wreck with that old Guild — and performed Jim Croce's "The Hard Way Every Time." His nervousness vanished the moment he started playing. "I went into this different world," he recalls. Kids who teased him came forward to say it was good. Teachers who didn't like him said they enjoyed it. That evening, he played again for the parents. His father cried.
Now 21, Alex writes, records, produces, and mixes everything himself in GarageBand. Every lyric is lived. Every chord is intentional. Every layer serves the story.
For features, collaborations, press, and anything else — reach out.
alexperezjr.music@gmail.com