He will perform at the festival on Lewis on July 16, having first visited at the age of 19.
Alexander says: “I was always playing music from a really young age, I flirted with the fiddle. and played drums for a while in a little rock band.
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“What happened was my mom took me to Scotland where she had lived for a while back in the day. It introduced me to the music she listened to when she was there and I just got really inspired.
“I was just at that age when I was like, this is the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. And so I abandoned punk music and went full on Scottish trad.
“I came back and I was like, I want to learn the pipes, and I was really, really lucky to have an amazing teacher who lives about 20 minutes from here called Murray Huggins.
“He’s actually a pipe maker. He’s an incredible craftsman who makes Colin Kyo Bagpipes and he does a lot of silver engraving as well for a lot of pipe makers that are based in Scotland.
“I was doing piping competitions, because there’s Highland games all over the United States. They’re everywhere and I was introduced to the more trad side of Scottish folk music and followed that path.
“My godparents live up in Vancouver in Canada and when I was about 15, they took me to see this band Dòchas, which Julie Fowlis was in with Jenna Reid from Shetland, and a bunch of amazing trad players.
Elias Alexander playing live (Image: Sarah Wright) “I started learning fiddle, and I wound up on Skye at Alisdair Fraser’s fiddle camp at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and that was my first experience of a whole bunch of people my age, just like staying up all night playing tunes.
“it was so inspiring to me. I was like, oh my God, I found it. I found what I was looking for.”
He said: “I wrote Moss in a single night, I had all this stuff in my heart from what I was going through at the time in a relationship.
“Sometimes these things sort of bubble up inside you and it’s when you can’t contain that emotion anymore, it just comes out in a song, you know? Or if there’s something that is eating at you inside and you can’t reconcile it. You think about it, you can talk to friends about it and you, but it’s still sort of there and it’s not sitting right. It can’t move or resolve. It’s stuck. I think those things end up coming out in songs.
“With Moss, the verses in the chorus very much feel like they’re describing those feelings and being in that place and then kind of the drop comes and there’s this big pipe melody.
“I don’t think at the time I even knew this was happening, but when I listened back to it and I hear that, it feels like this big soaring pipe melody is transforming the pain of the verses, into something different, getting through it, metabolizing it, digesting it in some way.
Elias Alexander (Image: Anna Colliton) “I think the essence of being an artist is to make yourself vulnerable in the truth of who you are and and it’s can be terrifying to open that up to people, but to truly let yourself be who you are and to let that come out, that is really the essence of what it is, to do this, to make music, to share music or to share art.
“When I was about 19, I volunteered on the stage crew at HebCelt. I’d left college in the States and I had worked in a grocery store in my hometown and I’d saved up a bunch of money and decided I’m just going to go travel around Scotland and hang out with music things and whatever.
“So I wound up going to HebCelt and was volunteering to get the Pass and I just remember we would be there like 7am in the morning, getting ready to load in. It was amazing. I saw all this incredible music and I think maybe even at the time I had this inkling of, maybe I’d be able to play at a festival someday like this.
“It feels like a really amazing full circle moment to be coming back. it’s funny because these things arrive and, and when you think about it, you’re like, Oh, this is, nuts. This is incredible.
“Here I am, this guy from Oregon, playing, playing pipes, playing fiddle. And suddenly I’m going to be playing at HebCelt in Lewis. I’m like, ‘Whoa!’ It’s such an honour to be invited and I’m forever grateful.
“Hopefully we’ll just dance together, jump up and down and scream and shout, and have a good time.”
