After navigating the most difficult aspects of the music industry, singer/songwriter Alex Winston releases ‘Bingo!’ – an album that is sometimes swaggering and self-assured, sometimes earnest and vulnerable, and always compelling.

Stream: ‘Bingo!’ – Alex Winston

After years of having her music career mismanaged by record labels, singer/songwriter Alex Winston found herself feeling confused and unsure of where her life was headed.

“It made me scared to put out music again,” Winston says of her negative experiences with the business side of being a musician. “I was really uninhibited with my writing before my first record, and even as I was making that record. But after that, there was a feeling of disappointment and feeling misunderstood.”

Long before this period of adversity began, Winston was just a teenager with a passion for singing and writing songs. She started writing music when she was in middle school, and soon after that, she began to record some of her songs and play live shows at local venues around Detroit, where she grew up. After graduating from high school, Winston continued playing shows in the area, even as many of her friends moved to New York City.

But she couldn’t resist the pull of New York for long. After a friend encouraged her to make the move, she relocated to New York and quickly started making connections in the local music scene. Not long after that, she signed her first record deal and began work on her debut album, King Con, which was released in 2012.

Although things began to come together quickly for Winston after her move to New York, her initial success was the product of years of hard work.

“I definitely grinded, and I’m so happy that I did,” Winston says of this period of her life. “Everything I’ve done, I feel so grateful for the experiences I’ve had – even when they’ve been brutal.”

It was in the aftermath of recording her debut LP that Winston began facing a series of challenges in her journey as a musician. King Con suffered from a lack of promotion due to the financial troubles of the record label she was signed to at that time.

Winston would then go on to have more disappointing interactions with record labels. Her second album was shelved by a different label, and she found herself feeling disoriented in an industry that valued her talent as a singer and songwriter but wasn’t quite sure where she fit into the music landscape from a business perspective.

But even in these difficult moments, Winston continued to move forward, and she didn’t let her negative experiences in the industry stop her from exercising her artistry. “I don’t feel like a victim, and I also don’t think my story is unique,” she says. “I just think it’s a very tough industry for artists.”

She found catharsis in a move to Los Angeles and a musical collaboration with producer Max Hershenow, who had undergone similar frustrations with the major label system. Under the moniker Post Precious, Winston and Hershenow released Crown, an EP full of infectious dance-pop.

“Post Precious was just to have fun,” Winston says. “I think it was very therapeutic for us to just put out fun dance music and not take things so seriously.”

Now Winston has rediscovered the sense of uninhibited freedom she felt when she first started as a musician, and she has channeled that creativity to great effect on her sophomore LP, Bingo!, which she worked on with a small team and released independently. She celebrated the album’s release with a live show at the event space in an art gallery in Los Angeles, surrounded by friends and fans. After the trying circumstances surrounding the release of her first album and years of feeling lost in the label system, Winston was able to experience the joy and excitement of fulfilling her artistic vision on her own terms.

“I feel really proud,” she says. “I can say ‘I did this for me.’ And it was such a different feeling at the release show putting on this party and playing these songs and being able to really celebrate.”

Bingo! is certainly an album worthy of celebration.

The record expertly weaves together elements of Americana, pop, and rock, with moments of singer/songwriter introspection as well. The variety of tempos and instrumentation helps each track feel fresh, and each song’s sound complements the lyrical themes it addresses.

Throughout the album, Winston’s vocal delivery adds an additional layer of emotion to the songs. She started taking opera lessons when she was ten, and you can hear that training in her vocal performances on Bingo! It’s a voice that’s both technically impressive and full of personality.

Winston wrote the songs on Bingo! over the course of three years, during a season of her life marked by significant change. “It’s a glimpse of knowing you’re not where you want to be yet, but you’re in the process,” Winston says of the album’s themes. “So, I think there’s that bit of discomfort. But nothing lasts forever, and you’re wading through it to get to the other side.”

The album’s title comes from the exuberant feelings Winston began to experience on the other side of these big changes in her life.

“I think it was more about seeing a lot of the patterns in my life and connecting dots and having some real ‘aha’ moments that were breakthroughs for me,” she says of why she titled the record Bingo!

But Winston also admits to a less philosophical reason for choosing the album title: “I’ve always been obsessed with the game Bingo. When I lived in Detroit, a fun Friday night for me would be to go Windsor in Canada at 19 and play Bingo and drink,” she adds with a chuckle.

Bingo! opens with “Stassia,” a rollicking, Americana-tinged track with a backstory that reveals how the freedom Winston rediscovered on this album shows up in her songwriting. “Stassia” was inspired by an eccentric women Winston and one of her friends met on a flight home from Las Vegas who had $15,000 in cash in her purse. Stassia was obsessed with the book The Secret and was convinced that she had manifested the cash in her purse, which she had won in a Vegas casino.

The encounter didn’t inspire Winston to read The Secret, but it did encourage her to rethink her attitude toward life and write a song about the encounter. “Maybe I will try changing my outlook on some things, because it seems to be working for Stassia,” Winston says with a smile.

After that striking opening track, we get “Hot One,” a song whose sonic texture is the perfect representation of the heat and frustration the song’s lyrics reference. Electric guitar feedback bleeds into a bass riff you can’t help but move to in the song’s intro. “I wanted it to have that sticky pavement burning your feet kind of feeling,” Winston says of the song’s sound.

“Hot One” is a song that works on multiple levels. On the surface, it’s about the inconveniences of an unbearably hot day. The song starts off by painting a relatable picture of the oppressive heat:

Feet are burning on the pavement forcing me to dance
Heat has got me in a headlock begging for a breath
Sweating like a dog I wish you’d leave the windows down
Asking for a comeback when I’ve always been around

Then on the second verse, Winston zooms out and sings about some of the ills facing society at large as both the literal and figurative temperature rises:

Now everybody’s talking over each other again
Sucking up the oxygen and poisoning our heads

“When you’re frustrated and hot, people start to do crazy things,” Winston says. “You get so wrapped up in your own frustrations and chaos that you can’t connect or communicate.”

On both levels, the song culminates in a triumphant defiance of the forces trying to bring us down:

Hell no, not today
Never gonna get at mine
Try and take my joy away
Hello Satan, not today
Running off the fire escape
Fever dripping down my spine
You can’t take my joy away
Hello Satan, not today

“Where My Cowboys At?,” the first song Winston wrote for Bingo!, encapsulates the upbeat, freewheeling attitude that permeates the album’s first half. The song begins with a rhythmic electric guitar and builds to a massive, melodic chorus:

It’s 85 and breezy in my head
I’m dancing up against the living dead
I can’t be the only brat living in the past
So where my cowboys at?

It’s a song that celebrates being young and carefree but also recognizes that the party can’t last forever. “I think being a musician can sometimes keep you young—in some positive ways and some not so positive ways,” Winston says. “This is kind of a victory lap—talking about all the dumb stuff I did in my past, being reckless and, frankly, immature. And knowing it’s time to change but still having one last hurrah.”

On “Indiana,” which kicks off the second half of the album, the party atmosphere begins to slow down just enough to allow for moments of earnest reflection. “I express myself through humor in a lot of these songs, but this one doesn’t have an ounce of it,” Winston says of the song. “And that’s because the experience hurt really badly.”

“I met somebody, and it was just a very impactful relationship, even though it was brief,” she continues. “It made me see a lot of the parts of myself that I didn’t want to see, so a lot of change came out of it. But it hurt like hell, and I just wanted to write a song that was really honest.”

That honesty comes through in devastating yet relatable lyrics dissecting the dissolution of a relationship, all set to beautiful melodies and the subtle beat of drums and strummed guitars:

I knew things were moving way too fast
Held a mirror up where it hurts
But this time you ain’t looking back
I did your dirty dishes, made your bed
Wrote a note that said I’m sorry
I think I got in my head

“Indiana” closes with an introspective bridge that succinctly reflects on memory, regret, and the lasting impact of the relationship:

I remember all of it
And I wish you did
But we were just kids
We were just kids

Now that Bingo! has been released, Winston is taking a moment to consider the next steps in her musical journey.

That may involve touring, but she’s also excited to get back into the studio, both to work on her own music and to collaborate with other artists as a songwriter and producer.

After making it through all the challenges Winston has experienced in the music industry over the course of her career, she also feels a pull to mentor other female musicians and help them navigate their own careers.

“I can relate to a lot of the struggles in this industry,” she says. “And to be someone that younger artists might feel comfortable working with – that’s something that I’d like to do, and it’s important to me.”

And through all the ups and downs, Winston still finds herself full of gratitude and belief in the power of music. “I feel very grateful that I get to make music and work with amazing people,” she says.

“When people get down on music – because it is a really hard industry – I think it’s important to focus on the really amazing parts of music, too,” she adds. “Even when you’re exhausted and tired and feel like no one cares, there can be those positive moments again.”

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Bingo!

an album by Alex Winston