Welcome back to Fan Chant, a weekly column for K-pop fans, stans, and newbies alike. Today, American Song Contest winner AleXa joins us to discuss her new single. And P.S. — if you love reading Fan Chant, you can subscribe to my companion newsletter to get it delivered right to your inbox each week!
The full interview with AleXa is also available as an episode of the Consequence UNCUT podcast. Listen below or wherever you get your podcasts.
If there’s one thing AleXa knows she can do, it’s work a stage.
In 2022, AleXa was crowned the winner of the inaugural American Song Contest, a television show inspired by Eurovision but instead executed with delegates from each of our fifty states. After spending years training in South Korea, AleXa came home, competed on behalf of her home state of Oklahoma, and immediately found a passionate fan base.
It’s no secret that over the past decade K-pop has carved out its own community in America, and AleXa seized the opportunity to give broader audiences a look into some of the magic. “If I do a TV show here in Korea, there’s seven different cameras and angles to hit and you have one chance to get it right,” she explains. “I was one of the only people [on American Song Contest] that was experienced in that… So I’m really grateful that I have my background in K-pop, because that, overall, teaches you how to perform well.”
Since being crowned the winner, she’s gone back to South Korea to continue making music, but has also had plenty of chances to come back to the US, including a slot at the most recent Jingle Ball, which offers a different kind of pressure. “I think it was the biggest venues I had performed in since my debut as an artist,” she recalls. “Jingle Ball is not a K-pop concert — it’s the general audience. But when I walked out it was to loud cheers and screaming and support… I was very happy the whole time I was performing, because nothing makes me happier than looking down and seeing someone smiling.”
On the day we spoke over video call, AleXa and I were both recovering from colds, and she was in the middle of a very lengthy press day, but she genuinely couldn’t have seemed more excited to talk about her newest release, a pop-punk track called “sick.” She explains that there’s a few different ways to interpret the song: “If you’re in a relationship with someone, you can think, ‘Oh, they’re so out of my league, they’re so much better than me, they’re so perfect — it makes me sick,’” she says. “But on the flip side, in reality, they’re so full of themselves. Oh, gross, that makes me sick.”
I’m so excited to have AleXa as our first Fan Chant guest to also appear on our podcast network series, Consequence UNCUT. In the episode, she breaks down some of the differences between living in Seoul, where she’s been for six years now, and spending time back in America. You can take the girl out of Oklahoma, but you can’t always take Oklahoma out of the girl — she says she misses Raising Cane’s most of all.
Listen to our full conversation at the links above, and check out the music video for her new song, “sick,” below.