For Strawberry Guy, the hope comes after the magic

Imbued with a peculiar romantic pensiveness, it wasn’t surprising that “Mrs. Magic” would be something Gen Z would latch onto, as it made daydreaming effortless in a world becoming exponentially bleak. 

Five years after “Mrs. Magic’s” virality and the release of his debut album, Strawberry Guy – the solo project of Welsh songwriter Alex Stephens – is back with Give Me A Dream, his second record. Borne from a flurry of life changes (and a bout of virality-induced impostor syndrome), Give Me A Dream is a testament to the spacious world Stephens can build. With his signature sweeping arrangements, Give Me a Dream carries luscious textures on strings and jaunty, playful rhythms.

In between his debut record and this one, Stephens’ life was filled with a consecutive series of milestones. He quit his job as a piano teacher to pursue Strawberry Guy full-time and moved to the US, bouncing between Liverpool and his bungalow in Los Angeles. 

For almost a year during the time between his first and second album, Stephens didn’t write music. “I’d come up with little things, but I felt like I couldn’t write for a bit or write something out,” he says. “I was just lapping up the life changes.” It’s also partly because he was starting to feel imposter syndrome, ensued by the traction “Mrs. Magic” brought his way. 

“I think after the virality of ‘Mrs. Magic’, I was quite nervous. Well, not nervous. How can I explain it?” Stephens muses before clarifying. “I felt like anything that followed needed to be as good, if not better.” 

As with most things, it was time that recuperated his confidence. “Time heals things. You settle into it,” Stephens says. 

Give Me a Dream is the genesis of that healing, an intuitive portrait of a period saturated with the nebulous emotions that tend to be cultivated by metamorphosis. It’s hard for Stephens to narrow down exactly how he was feeling during that time, and maybe he doesn’t have to; it’s all in the music, after all. 

“The songs are more dictated by emotion. There might be something going wrong in my life, some kind of relationship issues, and by that I don’t mean romantic. It might be friendships or family, but they’re kind of about that,” he says. “There’s not really a song that I’ve written about moving to LA. They’re kind of songs that are emotionally led, about something difficult that may have happened to me.”  

Despite moving from recording in his bedroom to the Sonic Ranch, the world's largest residential recording studio complex, Stephens kept the same DIY attitude in the process of making Give Me a Dream. 

The process of conceptualising the record remained largely the same as his first. Stephens wrote and produced everything himself, the studio and his musical collaborators more so a vessel for his ability to make music sound larger-than-life.

In his bedroom, Stephens could summon strings on his keyboard, but at the Texas recording studio, he was able to have string players execute his vision. “That was such an exciting part of it for me because I could be so creative,” Stephens says. “It’s interesting because I’ve never had the money for that before, but then obviously with the success of the other stuff, I had money to make a bigger sounding record, and I could do things that I couldn’t do before.”

He would try out different ideas for melodies, singing them to the string players so they could play an idea into fruition. “I think the good thing about people working with me is that I know exactly what I want,” he says. 

That assured vision lent itself to the record, clear in its soft but penetrating lyricism. It oscillates between longing and contentment – two sides of the same coin in the buoyant hope Give Me a Dream renders with its herculean melodies. That hope is the nucleus of the album. It’s a distinct kind, one characterised by the uncertainties that glare in a state of flux – intrinsic to this hopefulness is Stephens’ self-doubt shedding itself to reveal his self-actualisation as an artist. 

“I’ve kind of let go of feelings of, Is it going to be good? Is this ‘Mrs. Magic’? because I see it as a separate thing. Like yeah, it’s all my work, but this is just the next thing that I'm doing, and they shouldn’t be compared,” he says. “It’s a ‘hope-core’ record, and I’m just really proud of it.”