After six years of playing bass across Los Angeles for the Dead Ships, Alex Moore found himself feeling more than a little stagnant and drifting in regards to his musical soul. The debut single for Moore’s new project, Cowgirls, was inspired by a desire for “reinvention” and “to flip the script and change the monologue one can dilute themselves with when life moves quicker than most can keep up.”

Cowgirls debut single, “Loose Story,” was completed in one sitting on a sabbatical Moore took on the island of Kauai—after ingesting some fungi Moore found himself sitting on a lanai overlooking the green landscape, surrounded by a symphony of exotic bird-songs whose ghosts found their way into the song’s melody. Between Moore’s soothing vocals, which hold just the right amount of gravel, a sobering drone that rumbles against the single’s mix of country-goth-punk textures and lyricism.

Cowgirls itself was born out of Moore’s desire to “exact revenge” on his past-self, which led to the beginnings of a project that the artist began to feel alienated from. But no matter how discouraged, Moore trudged on:

“I had to continue on the trail of its inspiration that was producing songs laced with the perfect balance of sensitivity and grit. It felt like a spirit to invoke and live within was showing itself through the wreckage, to allow total transparency of a silent core, tired of its dormancy, wanting nothing but to click between the lines of a symbol and its message. A brand of human on the outskirts of care, to rally against both the archetypes of masculinity and the fragility of knowing one’s role. Something far away from the conventional norm. An upheaval of the chauvinistic trope that misguided heroes unapologetically identify with.”

Eventually a synchronicity developed—or was found—and Moore settled into Cowgirls. A moniker that he began to feel he could not only begin to identify with, but also grow under as an artist. When asked about his inspirations, which are vast and far-flung, Moore had this to say:

“In the pursuit of finding my equation without taking too much stock in what I think people would want to listen to, I believe I’ve narrowed it down to two monumental geographies in my life that have enriched my tastes with their varying degrees of epicenter for the genres they helped define. The first being the most dominant effector of Country-Western, as I originally hail from Nashville, Tennessee, and was born to a father who had been a prominent silhouette in the local music scene for the decades leading up to my birth. I’ve taken a lot of cues from those early memories of being exposed to the succinct expansiveness within storytelling in the country genre, which puts its emphasis on how the progression of simplicity can naturally evolve into a supremely wrapped nugget of wisdom or an offering of transcendent advice in the timespan of a three minute song, if one is in tune with the foundation of the initial idea or message.” 

Moore’s influences didn’t end there, however; his young move from his home in Nashville to Southern California brought out the punk in him. If you’ve seen Moore perform with his former band the Dead Ships, you know this man can thrash around.

“The other half of my influence being an almost opposite polarity that might seem misleading without more of the catalog to digest, Punk, stems from a relocation after my parents’ marriage grew to be too literal and parallel to some of the tear-drenched ballads of the southern region we were to flee, when my mother remarried and courted the family to begin anew in Fullerton, California.”

“It was an odd place to spend much of my formative teen years, which left me soaked in an early obsession with power-chorded brute force and aggressive brands of anger and honesty that had taken shape in the late 70s/80s in Los Angeles, to spread like a frustrated gospel throughout the rest of Southern California.

Moore quickly fell in love with the genre’s “relentless urgency.”

“To me, it seemed like country on methamphetamine, and looking back on it now, it’s easy to suggest that the moment I made this connection was the moment the seed was planted.”

Cowgirls will be embarking on its first shows relatively soon according to Moore. An EP is also soon to follow, with the follow-up single “Bad News, I’m Afraid” due out sometime in August.

Visit Cowgirl’s website, Facebook, and Instagram to stay updated on future releases and tour announcements.