Jacob Alon on In Limerence and festival season

The sleek interior of Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket Cafe is awash with sunlight as our April cover star Jacob Alon rolls in with a glamorous, oversized, hot pink, four-wheel-drive suitcase like Fife’s answer to Elle Woods. They thwack their guitar case down with a forceful sigh, telling me that they’ve just come from home in Dunfermline, and will be heading off to begin the Polari Europe/UK tour with queer pop icon Olly Alexander directly after our interview.

Despite their overwhelming schedule, Alon sits down at our table with a gentle smile and a calm, collected handshake. The swishy cowboy fringe lining the tapered cap sleeves of their T-shirt also reminds me that they’re not long back from performing at SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas. ‘No rest for the wicked’, I think. Yet, as they sip contentedly on their iced oat latte, sharp as a tack, you’d really never know just how many plates they’ve been spinning over these past few months. And ‘wicked’ is certainly the very last adjective I’d use to describe the person sitting across from me, given their sunny disposition and perfectly manicured fingernails. Alon is an angel in every sense of the word, radiant and attentive as they excitedly order a breakfast bagel.

The first time I’d encountered this sonic seraphim was in August of 2023 at McChuills’ in Glasgow where they served as a warm-up act for alt-pop darlings Walt Disco. I caught the tail-end of their performance, and ended up kicking myself the whole night wishing I’d gotten an earlier train. Their unique, intricate guitar-playing style and heavenly vocal timbre had everyone enraptured. The intense, trance-like focus on delivering each song to the audience in the most raw, honest, tender way possible was incredible to watch, even in that fleeting end-of-set moment. Since then, their otherworldly talent has taken them to soaring, Icarus-level heights. At the end of last year, they appeared on Later… with Jools Holland and just days before we meet they were interviewed by Elton John for his Rocket Hour. No biggie. 

I let Alon know that it’s slightly intimidating to be the person who has to follow up and fill the massive, sparkly, wedge-heel boots of a legend like Elton John, but they immediately put me at ease. “No, don't worry!” they laugh. “He was very sweet and complimentary but it was very fast and the FaceTime call was very glitchy. Obviously, I love his music… and his iconic cameo in Kingsman 2. It was very surreal and so cool to be in conversation with someone like that who has done so much and had the career that he’s had and is still championing young artists.” It’s plain as mud to see why good ol’ Uncle Elton would admire someone like Alon this much, especially now that I’ve listened through to their mystical upcoming debut album. 

On In Limerence, Alon graciously grants you access to a lush, auricular garden hidden away in a realm of their own meticulous design. Here, you’ll lose yourself in a dense canebrake of remarkable, alchemic songwriting amongst which lurks themes of self-destructive cycles, unrequited queer love and retreating into fantasy. You’ll find yourself indulging in its delicious spoils – delectable morsels of scratchy acoustic guitar, dewy drops of electric piano and unfurling plumes of rambling trumpets. It is also a place imbued with a deep sense of temporal liminality by the hazy, muffled snippets from childhood home videos and other faded foley work that Alon scatters over its leafy expanses, but you are lifted through these uneasy territories by the winds of hope and perseverance.

“There was definitely an intention of hope when I was building that world,” Alon says, casting their mind off to a seemingly distant place. “There’s a lot of despair I’ve felt and that has inspired a lot of the music, but I suppose the act of creating in itself is an act of hope. I believe in the other side of despair – transforming, healing, moving through pain and having it blossom into something beautiful. The album begins stepping into the mouth of the world of dreams and spiralling over the edge of what is real and what is memory, fiction, fantasy.”

Glimmer is the perfect instrumental track to lead you into this gaping maw of the dream world, calling out to you with an airy Greek mandolin, subtly submerging you in the mythology that the first song Of Amber explores – the story of Orion and the Pleiades. “I was fascinated with the story of Orion, this predatory hunter character who endlessly pursued these seven sisters – the Pleiades – who were then turned into stars by Zeus to protect them. I love telling stories through other stories and creating worlds in that way.

"Of Amber is a few things. I think of the song as embodying this idea of locking something away, like those amber inclusions that have bugs in them. The idea that you can contain something from millions of years ago, encased in something so beautiful, perfectly preserved in their youth… but also dead? I think it relates to that central idea of limerence and the self-protective nature of locking away a part of your heart inside of this place where, although it cannot age or be hurt, it also can’t be reached. It’s inaccessible, it can’t live. There’s also the person or character in the song, Amber, who I think represents the feminine parts of myself I can sometimes keep locked away.”

Jacob Alon. Image: Nico Utuk.

As Alon sits back in their chair, dabbing crumbs away from their cheeks and reflecting on what they have just unpacked, I see a person who cares infinitely about representing their feelings and experiences accurately through their art. Someone who will search tirelessly to find the exact metaphor or motif which best serves both themself and the music. Don’t Fall Asleep is another great example of this. Alon expels a stream of pensive lyricism from the perspective of a distant cousin who tragically died by drowning before Alon was born. They imagine, through this tender soundscape, what it would have been like if this life wasn’t cut so short. 

“It’s strange – even though I didn’t know him, I’ve felt the impact of his loss through the stories I’ve been told about him. I always had this kind of fictionalised idea of who he was, and would sometimes dream about him. His brother reached out to me with an album of ambient music he had made for falling asleep to, which was inspired by his brother’s passing. He told me that when they were kids, they used to pick out records to fall asleep to and, coincidentally, I had already half-written this chorus about ‘don’t fall asleep’. It was so spooky. 

"This song means much more to me than just the story it was based on. It’s about actively choosing to keep living. There’s this quote, I can't remember who from, ‘Sleep is the shy death’. I think that was my kind of philosophy with this song – don’t stay asleep in the world of fantasy because you don’t think you deserve real love.”

Alon touches base with almost every kind of love fathomable on this record. The stripped-back, on-the-verge-of-tears tone of Confession creates a mellifluous, fertile flower bed over which they express the sorrow that too often comes to young queer people who pine for those trapped in shame. The whispery, countrified rhythm of Zathura (which, yes, is a reference to the flop Jumanji spin-off starring Kristen Stewart and Josh Hutcherson) takes you into the woods near Alon’s childhood home where they explore their relationship with their little brother and the guilt they feel for not always being there for people when they ought to be. 

Then there are songs like Liquid Gold 25 (which feels less like a hit of amyl nitrate and more like a deep breath of fresh morning air) and the closing track Sertraline (which has a Strawberry Fields Forever kind of bittersweet) that delve into Alon’s struggles with addiction and other vicious cycles. “I speak a lot from the perspective of the drug,” Alon remarks. “But the ‘drug’ can be a lot of different things. The cycles of love and hate, the deleting and redownloading of Grindr, different self-destructive behaviours that I’ve dealt with. Poppers feels like that too, a temporary triumphant euphoria that allows you to escape, followed by crazy headaches and heart palpitations. I find myself chasing those ephemeral kinds of connection. Not sponsored by Liquid Gold.”

What is perhaps the most enchanting aspect of Alon’s character is their ability to find humour and optimism in almost everything, to find that crack of light piercing through the ceiling of a shadowy forest. It spills forth from them as they brush off the fact that they missed their first train to London – “oh well, we were just having such a great conversation!” – and it permeates this rich and multifaceted record. They squeal in delight like an eager puppy when I ask them about their various festival dates this year: “I’m so excited for festival season this year! I’m playing a festival this year that I’ve always dreamed of playing. Not many people know about it, it’s called Best Kept Secret… maybe for that reason? It’s a small one in the south of the Netherlands and it was the first proper music festival I ever went to. It’s a very cool, full-circle feeling. 

"I love European festivals. A lot of UK festivals can feel very cheap, and like they’re just trying to make as much money as possible with as little as possible. Not that it’s all about me, but in Belgium I got a full meal and my own cabin – over here you get a packet of cheese and onion crisps and a slap on the bum. If you’re lucky. The government could be doing a lot more to support festivals in the UK financially. But I am very excited, and I’m hopeful that the UK festivals I’m playing this year will be great!”

---

In Limerence is out 30 May via Island Records/EMI

---

Jacob Alon plays Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow, 5 Jun, as well as the following festivals: Les Nuits Botanique, Brussels, Belgium, 17 May; Dot to Dot, Bristol, 24 May; Nottingham, 25 May; Deer Shed, Baldersby Park, North Yorkshire, 25-28 Jul; Best Kept Secret, Beekse Bergen, Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands, 13-15 Jun; ypsigrock, Castelbuono, Sicily, Italy, 7-10 Aug; Green Man, Brecon Beacons, Wales, 14-17 Aug; PALP, Valais, Switzerland, 30 Aug  + more TBA