Hi, I’m LEX the Lexicon Artist, and this is Alter Ego: Explained.

Famous is a song about intrusive thoughts, delusions of grandeur, and the dark side of Ambition.

Famous is intentionally a huge departure from the sound of the rest of the album, although at this point, like with Raging Ego, I don’t know if Alter Ego really HAS a sound. Most notably, Famous is the only song apart from”party hop” that has majority singing vocals and features a rap break. Most other songs feature rap verses and a singing hook (or a rapped hook, although that’s more of an exception than the norm this time around). I challenged myself with not only a different vocal style and skill set, but also a different type of songwriting. It was a very ambitious undertaking, and I think I pulled off both pretty well, thanks to the impeccable production of my close friend and longtime collaborator Chris Songco, who you’ll hear later in the song Disappointment. More on that later!

In the last album I experimented with genres like industrial metal (Luthor), surf punk (psych major), and pop punk (Artist Anthem), so this time I turned my attention to a genre that I’d been wanting to try for a long time: late two-thousands electro dance pop. Think Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, Rihanna, or uh... Circus-era Britney? That’s right, it was time for LEX to become a pop star. With a really dated sound, which was an intentional choice.

Here’s what I knew I wanted: 1) predominantly singing vocals, 2) a rap break like all good pop songs do, 3) a catchy prechorus hook, 4) a powerful hard-hitting chorus, and 5) strategically used heavy auto-tune. Now I’m the kind of person who isn’t shy about telling my engineer, this needs a SHIT TON of auto-tune. It’s not that I can’t sing - as Cecil will tell you, making the song sound the way it does requires me to sing pretty much exactly on key, with pitch correction added mostly for the robotic effect. Although let’s not talk about how many takes this whole thing took to record. [closet takes] My god this song was hard to do. Anyway, I’m not a vocal purist and I recognize the value of using pitch correction to make it sound industry-standard. So I wanted to take it a step further and use it for dramatic stylistic effect. That being said, as I mentioned earlier, all of this still required me to actually sing, and record myself singing, which ended up being a totally different wheelhouse from recording myself rapping. I was scared to do it, and I overcame that fear. Guess what? It turned out pretty great!

Concept-wise, I think Famous is one of the songs that hews the closest to the themes of Alter Ego, along with songs like Alter Ego and The Redesign. I wrote the first and second verses on a bus from San Francisco to Petaluma on my way to a video interview in Petaluma in March 2019. That video’s on my website. The driving idea of the song is: there is a part of me that wants all the glamour that comes from the lights and cameras. Multi-story penthouse, billboards on Times Square, luxury hotels and vacations, and enough money in the bank to add guac at Chipotle without worrying about it. What can I say? I am a person of taste. These are of course all far-off fantasies, but fantasies can feel very intense and real. They can brew up an intoxicating blend of ambition and delusion. Famous is the song about what your ambition would sound like as a real person whispering tempting messages in your ear.

“Check out this future that I made with my mind.” “It’s with YOUR help that WE can get to MY goals.” When Ambition says “I want you”, they mean they want to CONTROL you. They want to work you physically, mentally, and emotionally until they can get what they’ve always imagined.

“When I get everything, will you be there for me?” Notice how Ambition doesn’t say “if” - Ambition thinks it’s a sure thing that they will get everything, but what they’re not sure of is whether their original self will still be there once the empire has been built. When people think about fame, they worry about losing who they once were, and if they’ll lose touch with the friends and family they now have. The protagonist’s Ambition also has that anxiety, but it’s overshadowed by their overwhelming desires. If you analyze the lyrics from the perspective of Ambition, everything makes sense in context. The rap breakdown is one of the best examples of this.

“I don’t ask for much, just a pledge of allegiance. You act an impostor, I’ll lend you my credence. Repress your emotions, I’ll empty your secrets, I’m keeping them all on the edge of their seats and they’ll never forget you, they’ll envy your genius, I’ll give you the best open ended agreement. You give me your all and I’ll take what you need, I’ll live in your soul and I’ll make you succeed.”

Ambition is addressing who the protagonist is now, and how they’ll change with the help of Ambition. “You act an impostor, I’ll lend you my credence.” The protagonist has impostor syndrome. Ambition doesn’t, Ambition is the real deal. “Repress your emotions, I’ll empty your secrets.”The protagonist represses their emotions. Ambition will “empty your secrets” - spill the beans to appeal to the audience. And so on. You see how everything fits? Also here’s a fun fact: I was a little inspired by contract-making scenes from Disney, specifically The Little Mermaid and Princess and the Frog. The line “I don’t ask for much, just a pledge of allegiance” recalls Ursula’s promise in Poor Unfortunate Souls: “It won’t cost much, just your voice.” And “You give me your all and I’ll take what you need” is a loose reversal reinterpretation of “You got what you wanted, but you lost what you had”, which is Dr. Facilier’s ominous mantra in “Friends on the Other Side” - which pretty closely captures the warning this song is trying to give about overindulging in your delusions. So as glamorous as the song might sound, it’s literally about the dark side of fame.

My longtime friend and musical collaborator Chris Songco was the producer of this track. He has a really good understanding of what kind of music I like, and I loved how he nailed the exact sound I was looking for. I remember the day he sent this beat to me on Facebook messenger saying “hey, I heard you were looking for a pop beat. Happy birthday!” I liked it so much that the beat has mostly stayed the same from inception to release, without any major changes. The only thing he added was a rap breakdown at my request, and he did that perfectly too.

I want to shout out my engineer Cecil again for doing an excellent job mixing and mastering this track, adding various levels of pitch-correction and vocal effects to make everything sound polished and overproduced, which is the exact style I was going for. I especially like the blown-out distortion he added to the chorus, which gave the whole thing a light poppy Trent Reznor sound. I feel like Famous is really a step in the right direction of where the Lex project could go next.

Yo! I’m Chris Songco, the producer behind the third single off Alter Ego “Famous”.

This track to me is about the road to fame personified. The desire of fame like they’re a person and the appeal we all make to someone or something we deeply want. Sometimes with a dash of lunacy.

LEX made a post for an instrumental with traces of the 2010 glam pop sound. I made the first skeleton for this track with the sentiment of artists such as Lady Gaga, Cobra Starship. But when LEX sent me her demo vocals over that skeleton, I got all of these like Nine Inch Nails industrial undertones so I knew I had to spice it up. I added a bit more crunch to the synths, a modal mixture switching between A major and minor, and a crazy breakbeat and I’m just really happy with how it turned out. It’s just this chaotic dance banger. It’s Famous and I hope you enjoy it.

PS-My favorite part of this beat is the synth that happens in the chorus that goes doo doo doo doo dooo doo dooo doo. I think that’d just be super fun to play live lol. Yeah, thanks for having me on the track LEX.

And thus concludes this Alter Ego: Explained. I gave you my all, you take what you need.