Alexandra Helgerson Rises From the Ashes of Cancer and Divorce
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This past May, Alexandra Helgerson, the Portland singer-songwriter who releases music as Lexie, took a quick trip to Los Angeles. There was a small acting gig to do and friends to hang out with. One such pal brought Helgerson along to the premiere of a TV pilot at a theater near the Lakers’ home base. After the screening, as she traversed a crosswalk on Olympic Boulevard afterwards, Helgerson suddenly felt a blunt object hit her square in the face, immediately dropping her to the sidewalk. Racing away from the scene was a large man carrying a tablet computer that was blaring music and was likely used to lay Helgerson low and leave her with two black eyes and a cut across the bridge of her nose.
“My friend didn't get a good look at him because she was tending to me,” she recalls. “It's hard to know if it was intentional or just a random act of the universe.”
The incident wasn't Helgerson’s first physical brush up against the unpredictability of walking this earth. In 2021 as she and her former husband were walking to the Wonder Ballroom to catch a set by Lucy Dacus, a distracted driver hit Helgerson with their car, sending her flying 10 feet in the opposite direction. Miraculously, she walked away with only minor injuries.
A year later, Helgerson developed this large bump on her left thigh that turned out to be dedifferentiated liposarcoma, a tumor that develops in the body's soft tissue. She spent the next six months going through the torture of radiation therapy, which left her cancer-free but physically frail.
The incident in LA, she says, is “the third thing. So I'm done until I die at 102 peacefully with all my limbs intact.”
We're laughing, but it occurs to me that there's another recent life event that Helgerson endured that may not have had physical implications, but was just as shattering as any of the above.
“It's interesting that you didn't mention your divorce as part of all this,” I offer, with some hesitation.
After a beat, a knowing and mildly pained smile settles on Helgerson's face.
“Oh…right.”
In most other conversations, I might have skirted around the subject, but it is the dual storms of cancer and the dissolution of her marriage that Helgerson explores with exacting, heartbreaking detail on her new album Halcyon Days.
The record, out this Friday, is Helgerson's first major statement as a solo artist and the first musical move she has made without contributions from her former creative and life partner Dean Vivirito. Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Alex Callenberger, Helgerson has crafted 11 blunt, smoldering songs that, musically, sinks into a lush Mojave 3-like zone where Americana and UK dreampop coalesce. Lyrically, she dances and tumbles along this musical lane, naked and unafraid. The scars of the past few years, which left her, as she sings on “IRL,” shaken and cracked “like the ’86 quake,” are fully on display. But so is her unabashed lust, her joy, and her growing acceptance of self.
“It's interesting because the album is titled Halcyon Days, which means a return to peaceful times and prosperous times,”Helgerson says. “I felt in the aftermath of my divorce and cancer and chemo, I need peace and calm and beauty and prosperity. There are some angry songs on the album and definitely more sad, but anger is the sister of pain. Yin and yang.”
Halcyon Days is also something of a creative rebirth for Helgerson—a chance to once again break down a personal wall that she first bumped up against in her early 20s. At the time, Helgerson was at drama school in the UK. Singing was part of the curriculum but, for some reason, she couldn't do it. “I would open my mouth to sing,” she remembers, “and just start crying. I wanted to do badly, but in front of my peers, it was terrifying.”
She was able to get enough of a song out of her throat—a musical setting of “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun,” from Cymbeline—to nail an audition for the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. For the next two years, she and the company performed various Shakespeare works in the manner of the era in which they were first staged: no microphones for the actors and music played on acoustic instruments. And before each play, the actors would play a set of songs for the audience—an eclectic repertoire that ranged from Victorian tunes to modern pop hits by Carly Rae Jepsen and the Beatles. “Anything was cool so long as the song had something to do with the play,” Helgerson says.
Even then, as she watched her fellow actors rehearse and perform this musical material, Helgerson was unable to summon the nerve to join in.
“I really felt like an outsider because I couldn't contribute,” she says. I was like, ‘Can I try shaking an egg?’ I was not good. That was such a blow to my ego because I wanted to do it, but I really couldn't.”
Something positive came out of the shame, at least: Helgerson bought a guitar and started to teach herself how to play. That’s what led her to a townie bar in Staunton called Marino’s to, at first, just hang out during their weekly open mic and jam session. She got a fast musical education, enjoying the locals’ original material and renditions of classics by Lefty Frizzell and Bill Monroe. Eventually, Helgerson gained the confidence to tread those particular boards. “They took me in,” she remembers. “It was nice. It took me a long time to get good. I was in my late 20s. I was not young.”
Helgerson’s practice of networking and woodshedding at open mics continued when she left for Los Angeles in the fall of 2013. She became a regular at El Cid, a former cabaret that has been the home for live flamenco in the city. While notable in her history as another step on her creative journey, the club also holds personal significance as it was there that she met Vivirito. At the time, he was a solo artist and was booked to play a set once the open mic had wrapped up.
“He didn’t see my one-song performance,” Helgerson says. “Maybe if he had we wouldn’t have gone together. We made eyes across the room and the rest was history.”
Their creative and personal relationship bloomed concurrently. They started making music and performing together under the name Who Can Sleep. The pair circled around an indie folk sound that isn’t too far afield from what Helgerson is doing on her own these days and created some fine work along the way like the shimmering original “All Your Love” and a wonderful tribute to Springsteen’s Born in the USA album. But even though the two shared songwriting credits, Helgerson felt an imbalance from the beginning.
“I didn’t know anything, and he knew a lot,” she says. “He’d been doing it a long time, and so naturally that led to conflict in our creative collaboration. It’s hard when you’re first learning something and it takes a long time to be comfortable. And all I can say is…” She pauses for a long breath. “It was uncomfortable.”
“There wasn’t any space,” Helgerson continues. “Then compound that with moving and family and codependency and trying to have a functional marriage where music was at the core of everything. I think for both of us, it just became impossible.”
The catalyst, she says, for wanting to end the marriage was her cancer. After the couple had relocated to Portland, Helgerson found the lump on her leg. She thought at first that it was a weird injury from running, but what started a bump the size of her thumb continued to grow in size. A visit to the hospital, including a consultation with what sounds like the worst radiologist on the planet, confirmed her worst fears.
“The nurse was kind, but he came in and was like, ‘It’s probably sarcoma. Prepare for chaos,’” she remembers, still aghast at the memory. “And he just left. Are you fucking kidding me?”
Even though the marriage clearly wasn’t on solid ground, Vivirito stuck by her side through months of cancer treatments that left Helgerson so physically and emotionally drained that she couldn’t even listen to music. “We loved one another, but we couldn’t resolve the problems,” she says, quietly.
The dust eventually settled at the start of 2024. Still in recovery mode and living with her mother, Helgerson was finally able to enjoy music again—her first post-chemo obsession: Taylor Swift’s Midnights—and felt the creative itch starting to grow within.
A friend in LA had commissioned her to write a song for a film, which she had started work on with Vivirito. Revisiting the rough sketches she had drawn up for the tune, she was determined to finish the job. Not yet confident enough to tackle the project solo, Helgerson knocked on the door of her former neighbor, Alex Callenberger, an accomplished composer and studio wizard. They found a creative groove quickly and immediately started thinking bigger than just a single song.
“We just had a lot in common with what we liked,” Callenberger says, speaking during a rare quiet moment following the birth of his first child, “and the influences we were inspired by. It just tumbleweeded into, ‘Let’s do this project.’”
Callenberger booked time at a local studio and put together the rhythm section that would anchor Halcyon Days: drummer Brandon Warren and bassist Jarred Venti. After getting their parts recorded, the sessions moved to Callenberger’s home studio. It was the perfect intimate setting for Helgerson to explore the deeper emotions and tough questions drawn out in her songs.
“I don’t think folks really understand how much work goes into organizing an album and getting it all together,” Callenberger says. “For her to come out of cancer treatment and a relationship and throw herself into this huge project is a monumental feat. There were lots of moments of tears and emotions that needed to come out. It was really brave of her.”
While Halcyon Days primarily wrestles with her dark days, Helgerson does allow shards of light to break through. “We’re Never Going Out” is a buoyant song about the joy of getting ready to take on the town with girlfriends before ultimately deciding to stick around the house instead. And there’s “Laura,” a heated tale of same-sex lust that Helgerson says was a spiritual cousin to “Keeper of the Plains,” a song that she developed in 2022 with Vivirito.
“It’s this summer love that you want to hold on to but you know it’s going to end,” she says. “It’s like those nights in Portland in the summer months when it takes so long to become dark, and the twilight is so beautiful and heartbreaking. I have this feeling of being a teenager growing up here where I needed to follow that light of wanting to have an experience with a lover or somebody who could feel that way too.”
Now living on her own for the first time in a decade and with the experience of making Halcyon Days behind her, Helgerson has felt the creative floodgates open up. She has a piano in her new house and is writing new songs with the instrument, and she’s mapping out a visual element of some sort to accompany this new material.
“I feel consumed with the music,” she says. “It’s what’s fueling me. I feel more free to explore who I am and just be who I am and love what I do unapologetically. I think that’s the biggest perspective shift. You don’t have to like or love this but, I do. Join in if you want.”
Lexie's album release show is June 26 at Atlantis Lounge. Halcyon Days will be released the same day.
Artwork for this edition is by Okazaki Kenjiro whose work is included as part of the summer exhibition at the Naoshima New Museum of Art in Kagawa, Naoshima, Japan.
