Let’s slap on our flea-market game faces: It’s time for Flashion Backward, a feature that’s the spiritual cousin of Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet. Don’t freak out, but today we’re joining Alex Woodard to revisit everyone’s favorite source of psychological trauma: high school.
Listening to hip, famous people babble about how lame they were in high school and how everyone totally picked on them generally makes me want to remove my ear lobes with the sharpest silver spork I can get my grubby mitts on. But for some reason, when Alex starts dishing, I’m all tea and sympathy.
This has nothing–absolutely nothing–to do with his rugged, gee-shucks cowboy good looks, three-day beard stubble, easy, breezy maybe-he’s-born-with-it-tousled hair, peaches and cream complexion, refreshingly laid-back basic T-shirt and genuinely worn Levis, or his honey-tinged twang. I swear.
I’m really more interested in the Southern Cali/former commercial actor/power popster/surfer boy’s personality. Generally, his guitar-strumming navel gazes are beautiful, chill and revelatory: he sings about getting old, falling in love and remembrances of things past. Apparently, he wasn’t always quite as adept at capturing mixed emotions, which brings us, as always, full circle back to the fact that we were all asshats in high school.
Check out Woodard’s bemused examination of the “deep,” “dark” and “cool” stuff he wrote about back in the day:
TOPICS: Flashion Backward, Kathleen Willcox