Alec Benjamin is writing songs like he’s stuck in a haunted snow globe—beautiful and brittle and circling the same thoughts over and over. His sophomore record, These Two Windows, landed during the pandemic, when promoting music meant livestreams, FaceTime co-writes, and the occasional nervous breakdown about whether anyone would even care.
“It’s not fun anymore,” Benjamin admits. “Right now there is no end, it’s just the means.”
But here’s the twist: These Two Windows doesn’t sound like it was born out of doomscrolling and bad lighting. Instead, it’s a poetic, introspective collection of stories filtered through Benjamin’s unique lens. “I just wanted to share the world through my lens,” he says. “There wasn’t one message I needed to convey. It was more like, here’s what I’m seeing.”
He’s a storyteller in a genre that doesn’t always make room for them. The lyrics are often intricate, often bruised. Think Cohen, not TikTok-core. And that’s no accident.
“I found Leonard Cohen at summer camp,” Benjamin says, like he’s confessing to something sacred. “Everyone was singing ‘Hallelujah,’ but they all thought it was a Jeff Buckley song.” That discovery led him down a rabbit hole of poetry and honesty—two things he tries to inject into every song he writes, even if they also need to be “commercially viable.”
That balance—honesty vs. virality—is something he struggles with openly. “Sometimes a song may be catchy, but if it’s not meaningful, I don’t want to do it,” he says. “And worrying about whether the songs are gonna sell? That just made everything not that much fun.”
Benjamin had big plans for the record: touring, connecting with fans, maybe even releasing a part two. But the pandemic hit pause on all of it. “I have other songs I’ve been working on that I wanted to tag onto this album, but I wasn’t able to because of coronavirus,” he says. “So I’m hoping the restrictions ease up so I can get back in the studio.”
In the meantime, he tried writing over FaceTime. Once. “It was fun,” he says, before immediately recanting. “But if I see another Instagram live performance, I’m gonna have to go over there and turn the phone off personally.”
The quarantine anthem “Six Feet Apart” came out of that moment—written and recorded on his iPhone—but don’t expect a follow-up. “I don’t think I’d want to make another song like that,” he says. “I’d rather go back to doing it the old-fashioned way.”
There’s a weariness in his voice when he talks about it all, but also defiance. He’s still writing. Still obsessed with language. Still dreaming of co-writes that don’t require a Wi-Fi password. His bilingual fluency in Mandarin hasn’t quite made it into a full-blown song yet—“I can order dinner in Chinese, but I can’t write a poem”—but it hasn’t stopped him from thinking about the ways we connect through music.
By the end of our chat, Benjamin is still cagey about the exact meaning of some of the songs on These Two Windows, but one thing is clear: he’s tired of staring out at the world through a screen. He wants a stage. An audience. A reason.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
