alicia blue

Alicia Blue (pronounced: Alee-see-yuh)
Born and raised in the last eastern town of LA County, just steps from the San Bernardino border, the daughter of a truck driver father and bank teller mom, Alicia Blue is no stranger to desolate landscapes. Desolation is something that comes to mind when recalling her childhood, despite her insistence that she is also a “closeted optimist.”

Arts weren’t a prominent thing in her working class family. But after her parent’s divorce, her uncle handed a then 12 year old Alicia Bob Dylan’s Desire and said, “This is one of the greats. You should listen.” That was when something awakenedinside her. It started with little poems, a deeper dive into Dylan, and then over to Jewel’s Pieces of You. She’d listen on repeat and write for hours.

In her sophomore year of high school, her English teacher introduced her to Kerouac’s On the Road and the poems of Allen Ginsburg. Still having never sung or played an instrument before, she was focused on writing and poetry when she moved the hour-plus west to LA to look for the very thing she would need to survive in a city like LA.

Working multiple jobs to pay rent while in college, Alicia stumbled upon a job helping to take care of an aging soul singer named Malcolm Hayes, Jr who’d been disabled from a stroke. It was that fateful meeting that opened the doors to her realizing she needed to set her words to music as a means to reach people…and it was Malcolm who first said to her, “Why are you so blue?”

Up until then, Alicia had never played more than a few chords on guitar for fun at an old boyfriend’s house. But she was determined to learn to play for real and studied and practiced relentlessly. In 2015, Alicia Blue did her first open mic and started writing her first songs.

Alicia began busking around LA, playing every open mic and opening shows whenever she could. One of her first recorded songs, “Magma,” was featured by Starbucks in their stores worldwide and on their Spotify playlist and brought her a good amount of attention. By 2020, Alicia had established herself in the LA music scene as a true poet / songwriter.

In 2021, Alicia Blue started spending a lot of time in Nashville writing and working on new music. This led to a deeply creative period in which she began collaboratingwith people like John Paul White (Civil Wars), Sadler Vaden (Jason Isbell) and Lincoln Parish (Cage the Elephant), setting the stage for what would become 2022’s release Inner Child Work, produced by Lincoln Parish and recorded in Nashville. The following spring 2022, Alicia packed up her life and relocated to Nashville. That same winter, Alicia Blue was named one of American Songwriter’s 16 Artists to Watch in 2023.

In late summer 2023, Alicia recorded a new batch of songs with producer Dan Knobler (Allison Russell). She caught the attention of legendary producer/songwriter Butch Walker that year, bringing them together to write for her album, and even having him feature on one of her songs.

Alicia Blue wrapped her second year in Nashville with one final meeting that would consecrate her path and place as a songwriter, in which she got to give an impromptu performance of her songs for the legendary Lucinda Williams at a party. That led to Lucinda featuring on her upcoming single, “Tennessee,” (out July 2024) and a growing friendship between the two that included Alicia going out to support her on tour.

With a newly finished album and a growing presence on the Nashville scene, Alicia Blue is moving forward in 2024 with the release of her new album, Tags, and its first single, “John Wayne,” hitting on June 6.