Alex Blum Blends Blues Guitar & Future-Funk on “Believe Everything You Hear About Me”
North Carolina native Alex Blum delivers a heady, genre-bending statement with his latest single, “Believe Everything You Hear About Me”—an introspective, blues-soaked odyssey that sits somewhere between confessional and cosmic, wrapped in gritty guitars and minimalist electronic production.
Now streaming everywhere, the track is a standout from Blum’s 2025 album Good Weather, a self-produced tour through blues-rock terrain with detours into hip-hop, ambient, and progressive sonic realms. Built from the ground up with Blum on guitar, vocals, harmonica, drums, keys, and production, “Believe Everything You Hear About Me” is equal parts confrontation and transcendence.
“It’s a song about things people say about each other,” Blum writes. “On one level, you know it’s in your power not to let other people’s lies affect you. But at the same time, your life is very much affected by them no matter what you do.”
The song reads like a modern-day blues diss track without names, biting with sarcasm:
“So believe everything you hear about me / And make sure you ask for details too / And go take all your authority / And go make it true.”
The track’s psychedelic guitar solo—layered with delay in the spirit of Eddie Hazel’s “Maggot Brain” and John Frusciante’s whammy-warped leads—anchors the emotional surge.
“It’s not quite rock music because of the electronics, and not quite electronic music either because it’s mostly driven by the playing,” Blum explains. “But overall the song still feels bluesy.”
This duality defines Good Weather, the follow-up to Blum’s fast-tracked blues LP Speak Dreams to Me. It’s a cohesive yet eclectic body of work that threads together his diverse catalogue: from traditional blues and instrumental guitar EPs to danceable beats, ambient textures, and even a rap mixtape. Still, it always returns to what matters most: the guitar and the message.
Blum’s music, rooted in Chapel Hill and forged from late-night Asheville sidewalks and solo studio sessions, is soaked in authenticity and unfiltered expression. A line cook by day and a sonic architect by night, he brings the same raw energy to the studio as he once brought to the streets of Asheville and Nashville, busking with an amp and an idea.
Hi Alex! Good to see you again! Care to introduce yourself to the readers for those not familiar with your music?
I am a multi-instrumentalist and a composer in multiple styles too. I’ve been playing music almost my whole life, and right now I’m just doing it for the joy of creating music but I’d love to somehow transition my life to where I’m making enough money on music to quit a day job.
This track blends blues, hip-hop, and psychedelia—how did you even begin to approach writing something so fluid in genre?
For years, my musical approach has itself been fluid in genre. At the time that I started learning to produce my own music at home around 2015 or so, I was primarily a rock musician, and realized it was necessary to learn to produce electronic music and sample-based hip hop beats, which I also enjoyed anyway, to get my skills on a laptop computer up to proficiency. So I already had all those sounds at my fingertips before I ever wrote the song. Music production is sort of like cooking; you could have one dish that’s made with rice and some other ingredients but if you substitute the rice for pasta, now you’ve taken the same thing and made it slightly different; in the same way you can mix and match any element of a musical production such as live drums vs drum machines, synth vs guitar, etc; and generate what would ultimately be an infinite number of combinations. I often imagine combinations that appeal to me, and now that I’ve advanced my production skills, that can even come before lyrics, melody, or anything else in the compositional process.
You play nearly every instrument on the record—what’s your writing process like when you’re building a song from the ground up?
Actually, I play every instrument, not nearly every instrument, and I also mixed and mastered the album as well as doing the so-called “sound engineering”. Like I was saying, I’ve taken every single aspect of the music production process into my hands, and after accomplishing that, my mental process has also incorporated all of those techniques into the ideation process. So when I was just learning music, every song I wrote started with guitar, either a riff or a chord progression, to which I would usually add the other elements. Then I remember one day seeing a band start off their set with all the members playing percussion, and I went on to write my first song that was based around the drum pattern, and also started with the drums. As my vocal abilities have developed over the years, I started composing a few songs, starting with the vocal part, and adding the accompaniment in after. I recall writing the first two tracks on the album, “Godsend” and “Hometown,” in that way, singing out a capella, and I probably had all the lyrics finished for both songs before I figured out the chords. Nowadays, I am also liable to start a song off based on a beat I produce, or even a sound with an interesting tone. This approach also helps me find a bit more variety in my songwriting as well as helping me continue to hone my skills on all the aspects I’ve chosen to work on.
You’ve made everything from blues records to rap mixtapes—how do you decide what musical lane to follow next, or do you even think in “lanes”?
Ultimately, I do want to generate a style that sounds completely unlike anything else anyone has ever heard, which I recognize is still some ways off. I really just make whatever I want to listen to. My newest album, which is already most of the way finished, is another rock album, this time recorded on an electronic drumset (Speak Dreams to Me is recorded on live drums, and Good Weather is all computer-generated drums), so I like the live feel that the songs have due to my free-flowing tempo as I recorded the drums. I programmed some of the songs on Good Weather to speed up and slow down subtly at crucial points in the song, but that effect comes through even better when you have an actual drummer keeping time with no metronome, which is how I like to record.
So I have a few ideas and sounds kicking in my head that I want to actualize. As of right now, I am actually planning out up to three more albums after the one I am finishing, based on styles I want to explore. I want to make a reggae album, and I will start that next, when I’m done with my current rock/blues-rock album. I also have a concept for a sort of indie/folk, acoustic-leaning album that is also blended with noise music and ambient music, and experimental production techniques. I really enjoyed making my other new album titled “Abstract Sample-Based Music,” which is a sort of genre all its own; it is an album I made using mostly samples from classical music that I completely re-arranged and used for composition. So it has the texture and feel of what you’d call either ambient music or noise music at different times, but it also has a compositional structure to it; you are hearing new notes and melodies developing as the music is also going through all sorts of sonic developments based on sample manipulation. So I want to keep developing that technique but also fuse it with songwriting. This album concept, this very distinct sound, has been living in my head for more than a few years now before I have ever taken any steps towards actualizing it. The other style I am sure I eventually want to make is a funk and R&B album. I also have some synth-pop tracks on my computer that I’ve never released, but if I eventually decide to make more songs like that, it could eventually form an album, too.Â
The album’s called Good Weather—what does that phrase mean to you in the context of the music? Is it ironic, hopeful, or both?
Ironic and hopeful would both apply. I made the album in Asheville prior to Hurricane Helene, and the whole city was shut down for a while. Both of my day jobs at the time were flooded and are still not reopened. When the hurricane happened, I basically had a mostly finished album sitting on my computer, and I was waiting to finish it. Then, after the hurricane happened, I decided to just go ahead with it, and it was an easy way to get things moving in my life again by releasing the album. “Good Weather” is basically saying, you could have a historically destructive hurricane, and you can still just get on with it and choose to perceive the weather as good any way you slice it.