Everclear frontman Art Alexakis likes to elongate his vowels, especially the letter o, when delivering his catchy tunes about flawed men and women trying to make sense of their world. His approach to singing — shouty but tuneful, terse but expressive — stood out from the pack of 1990s rock bands that surfaced in the wake of Nirvana’s success. His knowing, world-weary voice — he was, at 33, older than most of his peers when Everclear broke through with 1995’s Sparkle and Fade — is as much of a signature as his low-slung guitar and bleach-blonde hair.
Thirty years on, Alexakis is still touring, still singing songs that gave him a life he imagined might never come as a child of a broken family. His willingness to mine that childhood and its deep ripples is apparent in much of Everclear’s best-known output, beginning with Sparke and Fade, which Alexakis is celebrating with a 30th anniversary tour.
Listening to the record today yields a wash of nostalgia and yearning for a less chaotic time — an era when MTV and KROQ could break a song like “Santa Monica” into the mainstream and kickstart a run of records and tours that continue to draw new converts.
“We’re getting a lot of young kids who weren’t even born when those records came out,” Alexakis said in a recent interview with the Substack Zero Cred. “For them, it’s just valid rock and roll. They tell me that when I talk to them, that they’re not getting it from contemporary music, so they’re gravitating towards the ‘90s. They consider that classic rock, which makes sense to me because me and all the other people that were making music in the ‘90s, we all came of age in the ‘70s when original classic rock was there. So it’s cyclical.”
As expected, Alexakis and his current bandmates run through each of Sparkle and Fade’s 14 songs as well as fan favorites from other albums like “I Will Buy You a New Life,” “Father of Mine” and “Wonderful.” They, of course, close with “Santa Monica,” its signature refrain as relevant today as when Alexakis conjured it three decades ago: “Swim out past the breakers/Watch the world die/Yeah, watch the world die.”
Everclear plays Bogart’s on Oct. 28 at 8 p.m. More info: bogarts.com.
This story is featured in CityBeat’s Oct. 15 print edition.
This article appears in Oct. 15-28.