Alex Hope is an award-winning Australian singer, songwriter, and producer, and the latest reason for you to feel like your life has been tragically unproductive. Despite her young age, Alex is one of the world’s most in-demand songwriters.
As Vice notes, Alex moved to LA from Sydney last year so she can further her career, which is already plenty to boast about. She’s worked with the likes of Troye Sivan, Broods, Tove Lo, Nick Jonas, Jason Mraz, and is about to collab with Hailee Steinfeld.
She’s also received props from the giants of her field, namely Max Martin, who’s basically dominated the pop charts since the late ’90s, as well as other chart-busting songsmiths like Jack Antonoff, Benny Blanco, and Greg Kurstin.
And the young Australian is giving these big names a serious run for their money. Take ‘Youth’ for example, Alex’s collaboration with fellow Australian Troye Sivan. It’s been streamed 150 million times on Spotify and almost 31 million times on YouTube.
“One day I picked up my dad’s guitar and it overtook my love for anything else,” Alex told Vice. “At that stage I really wanted to be a singer-songwriter but then I tried it and realised that performing scared the living hell out of me.”
“I got the buzz from writing songs though so convinced my parents to let me move to the Australian Institute of Music for my last years of high school. When I got there, that was it. I started producing my own songs at home and sending my CDs out to producers and anybody that would listen.”
“I was really lucky, some of my music was picked up by a producer living in Australia called Robert Conley and also Brian McFadden. They took me into the studio when I was 18 and that led to my first job working with Tina Arena.”
“I went to Paris, wrote four songs, played guitar and bass and sang backing vocals on that album. After that I got a job writing songs for the X Factor winners and also wrote a song called ‘Borrow My Heart’ for Taylor Henderson which became my first number 1 in Australia.”
And this was all before she was even 19-year-old. Alex soon signed a publishing deal with Sony and began working with some of the country’s biggest artists, including the likes of Jess Mauboy and Guy Sebastian, all the while growing her international profile.
Indeed, it’s only a matter of time until outlets like Billboard and SPIN are billing Alex as ‘the female Max Martin’, which Martin himself acknowledged when he asked Alex if she was “ready to be the face of female production”.
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“I had no idea that it was like this,” Alex said. “There are women producing their own music but not many producing other people’s work.” But Alex has been able to use the male-dominated professional songwriting space to her own advantage.
“I’m getting a good response from young female artists and their labels because normally they’re writing with older guys and they don’t necessarily feel comfortable speaking about boys or things close to their heart,” she said.
Incredibly ambitious and with the world at her feet, Alex’s bucket list includes names like “Taylor Swift, Adele, Haim” and she would love to see “an all-female-written and produced track out there”. Looks like it’s only a matter of time.
