An Interview with Everclear's Art Alexakis

The frontman reflects on the 30th anniversary of the band's breakout album, 'Sparkle and Fade.'

Apr 02, 2025

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Every magazine article I read in the 90s portrayed success as something that just sort of happened to alternative rock bands. Nirvana magically got plucked out of suburban obscurity and accidentally sold a bajillion records. Whoopsie! In interviews, these musicians talked about fame and success like unforeseen inconveniences, as if it was some annoying byproduct of art they were forced to deal with. But Everclear frontman Art Alexakis stood out among them because was very candid about success: He wanted it. He needed it, in fact.

Alexakis was already in his 30s when Everclear signed to Capitol Records in 1994, several years older than his rock peers, and had a newborn to feed. After the success of the band’s 1995 Capitol Records debut, Sparkle and Fade, a SPIN cover story entitled “Art and Commerce” portrayed him as an alterna-rock anomaly for knowing as much about mechanical-royalty clauses as he did about guitars and amps. The article went on to mention that his careerism put him at odds with his local scene, where he was “loathed by the Portland hipoisie.”

Alexakis didn’t seem to give much of a shit about that stigma then and, reflecting on the 30th anniversary of Sparkle and Fade, he still doesn’t. Over the last three decades, any criticisms have been overshadowed by the commercial success of the record. Within a year, Sparkle and Fade went platinum on the strength of its two singles, “Heroin Girl” and “Santa Monica.” The album also laid the groundwork for Everclear’s even more successful follow-up, So Much for the Afterglow, which went double platinum and earned the band a Grammy nomination.

This fall, Everclear will be commemorating the 30th anniversary of Sparkle and Fade with a 40+ date US tour. I recently talked to Alexakis about the cost of professional ambition, why the so-called grunge movement is misremembered, and how the music industry has changed since Sparkle and Fade was released.

Are you a nostalgic person? Do you like looking back at old times?

Art Alexakis: I do. I think a certain amount of nostalgia is healthy and good. I really do. And I think that a lot of people are glomming onto 90s bands now and it’s kind of going crazy which is good. But at the same time, we’re getting a lot of young kids who weren’t even born when those records came out, in their late teens, 20s, early 30s. And so for them, it’s just valid rock and roll. And they tell me that when I talk to them, that they’re not getting it from contemporary music, so they’re gravitating towards the 90s, which makes sense. They consider that classic rock, which makes sense to me because me and all the other people that were making music in the 90s, we all came of age in the 70s when original classic rock was there. So it’s cyclical. There’s a lot of new rock bands of kids whose parents grew up in the 90s, and I think they’re just carrying the torch forward. And I hear some pretty cool stuff. There’s some cool young bands out there.

How much do you keep up on new music? And do you ever hear Everclear’s influence on music now?

Well, I mean, there’s apparently four or five working Everclear cover bands. I’m sure they do other stuff as well, but there’s one called Sparkle and Fade. I’m flattered, man. I think that’s kind of a sign of legacy, right? I think it’s pretty cool. But yeah, there’s some young bands that I really like. There’s Starcrawler out of L.A. I don’t know if you know those guys. They’re signed to Jack White’s label, Third Man, and they’re kind of like the Stooges or stuff like that. They kind of have that feel with a very strange, very talented girl singer. You should check them out. There’s all sorts of stuff going on. And just kids picking up guitars and playing and making noise.

It’s funny, because as someone who lived through the 90s, I’m sometimes confused by the way it’s romanticized by younger people now. I agree with you that it’s cyclical, but watching it come around in the cycle, it’s almost reduced to a fashion trend or something. It’s a bit off, you know?

Well, they weren’t there. The light of nostalgia has a very rosy glow to it. And I think that that’s a condition of the human being that makes sense, that we tend to minimize the bad things that have happened and illuminate the things that give us joy.

Yes. And to that point, I feel like there were a few things from the 90s that have been extrapolated since, like with the 90s grunge movement. I feel like in hindsight, kids now have picked the winners—Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins and Pearl Jam. And I don’t know if it’s because they have such good branding that their shirts are in Target. I don’t know what it is, but there was so much more to this decade in this music than the selective things that it’s being reduced to.

Well, absolutely. Nirvana, of course. I mean, that’s valid. But let’s be honest about it. I was living in Portland in the 90s. No musician from Seattle or Portland or the Northwest was saying they were grunge. That’s something that the marketing guys and those knuckleheads over at Sub Pop came up with. And fans were very skeptical of it. The thing that was going on in Seattle had a lot more electric guitar and leads and was more of a throwback to the 70s, but it had a swagger to it. The Portland stuff and a lot of the other stuff in Tacoma and Ellensburg and Spokane—Screaming Trees, Tad, all that stuff—all those bands that got lumped into grunge were more punk rock, especially the Portland bands. We had short hair, gasoline jackets. We weren’t following that visual trend. And a lot of people today don’t get that. When they think 90s and rock, they think grunge. Or they think Green Day and Offspring and new school punk, pop punk. And in a lot of ways, those are valid. But the grunge thing, now I don’t even argue with it. When people talk about grunge, I’m like, “Yeah, okay.” But it really wasn’t a thing.

But then again, when Creed came out in the late 90s, early 2000s, everybody fucking hated them. Hated them! Reviewers, everybody hated them, except for the fact that they sold a lot of records. People in the middle of the country, the flyover states, fucking loved them. All the white kids loved them. Now they’re coming back and people that would have spit out their name if you talked to them about it are going on tour and going on the cruise with them.

Everything gets cleaned out in the wash.

That’s what I said—the rosy glow of nostalgia. The rosy glow of hindsight, really.

You signed to Capitol in ’94. How did that come about?

I moved to Portland from San Francisco. I had a record label there and was doing mostly alternative country with kind of a punk feel to it. I moved to Portland in December of ’91. I decided I was going to do one more band. I had a baby coming in June. I was going to be 30 years old, which, oh my God, was so old. And I was going to do one more band. I put an ad in the paper and started a band. I wasn’t sure how good we were, how good the guys were, I really worked with them. And later, in December of ’92, I had a chance to go in the studio, and with a quarter-inch eight track and $400 worth of credit, the producer gave me 40 hours of recording time and we recorded every song we had. I called it a demo tape. Because there was so much feedback because I couldn’t afford new tubes for my Fender amplifier, I called it World of Noise.

I sent my demo tape to everybody in the Northwest—venues, reviewers, clubs, theaters, radio stations, everybody. I sent it to South by Southwest, and they called me. They never called; they always wrote. But they called and they go, “We’re running out of time, but we loved your demo tape. We want you to come. We’ll give you two showcases.” We went and did it and came back. By the time we got back from that two-week trip to Austin, everybody and their brother had called. There were 67 messages on my phone machine. That’s when it started happening for us. So as far as getting signed goes, it was just a process from there of touring. We did a tour in ’93—South by Southwest again, CMJ—and the labels started coming around. And finally, in ’94, they jumped. We picked Capitol out of them. So that’s how they came around. A lot of people are like, “God, it was so quick for you.” And I go, dude, I’ve been playing in bands since I was 16!

It always seems quick from the outside but long when you’re the one putting in the work.

I’ve got my 10,000 hours, man.

Yeah, you’ve done your Malcolm Gladwell hours, for sure. I was asking because major labels were very taboo at the time. It was not punk to have ambition. But everything that I’ve read about you—

But that had gone away. That had gone away by ’94, ’95. I mean, there were still some people in Portland that were like, “Oh, you sellout, blah, blah, blah.” And all the people that were saying that were trust fund kids. There was this one guy who hated me and he was bad-talking me to everybody, and they wouldn’t give me gigs and stuff like that. And I come to find out later he’s part of the local steel mill family. He changed his name so no one would know he’s got hundreds of millions of dollars. Those people were like, “Art’s such a careerist.” And I’m like, “Yeah, I am. I got a baby at home. I’m on welfare, motherfucker!” Sure, I want to do what I want to do and I’m not going to sell out, but I’ve got to make a living.

Did that ambitious drive turn people off?

Very few. A little bit in Portland. But after we signed, all those other motherfuckers who were talking shit on us—I kid you not, Dan—within two months they were all signed, too. And I said it in a local paper, and they just felt stupid. They didn’t respond. I said, listen to my record that we’re working on, which inadvertently came to become Sparkle and Fade. Saying that that’s a sellout record? You have a hard row to hoe to prove that one. There’s a lot of feedback, it’s noisy, the first single off it was called “Heroin Girl.” Do you know how hard it is to get something like that played?

I grew up in a punk background, so I’m always very interested when people treat their music career with unabashed ambition like you seem to have done. That’s like a punk faux pas or something.

But I don’t know that it was unabashed ambition. I wasn’t bragging about it. We just got a record deal that made sense. They didn’t give us that much money, but I could pay the bills. But I backloaded [the contract] if we sold a bunch of records. The labels at the time were like, “Most bands don’t sell records, so sure, give them what he wants.” Guess what? We did. Oops. And they tried to renegotiate it. I was like, “Nope. Not unless you renegotiate more money for me.” And then I gave them a triple platinum record with Afterglow. To me, you’re talking about—how old are you? Like, 35?

Oh my God. Thank you. I’m 41, but thank you.

Okay. You look good. But you’re still 22 years younger than I am. So your idea of what’s unabashed ambition is not the same as mine. Unabashed ambition is like, “Okay, what’s hip right now? How are they dressing? I need to cut my hair like that. I need to start making music like that.” And there were a lot of bands that did that. But if you listen to Colorfinger and you listen to everything else I did before the demos I did, I didn’t change my shit around; it just progressed as time went on.

Not chasing trends, but I meant you were very hardworking and industrious. Would you agree with that?

Absolutely.

I remember that SPIN cover story on you. You said in it that a lot of your drive came from redirecting your energy from getting clean and sober. Is that how you saw it?

I didn’t do it consciously, but I think it sure happened through osmosis. Before, my drive was to fill the hole inside that can’t be filled. That’s what being an addict is. I was a fucking alcoholic and addict. I’m still an addict. I’m recovering. I haven’t used or done drugs since 1989. It’ll be 36 years in June. But I get addicted to anything. And it’s just the way I was built or maybe it was from the abuse that happened really young. I don’t know. I definitely have that gene. And my oldest daughter doesn’t have it, but my youngest daughter, absolutely.

She has an addictive personality?

Yeah. When she was two years old, my wife and I just knew she needed more.

Do you think success became a new form of addiction for you?

Absolutely. And sex and everything that goes along with it. Especially during that period, I was kind of what we call dry drunk in the program, whereas I wasn’t working in a program and I wasn’t going to meetings, I didn’t have a sponsor, and I was using sex and success and money as a means of using, of trying to fill the hole. And it doesn’t fill the hole. Only you can fill the hole.

But obviously, the hard work that you put in paid off and Everclear had so much success around Sparkle and Fade. But do you think that success came with any sacrifice or negative impacts? Was there a downside?

I don’t see a downside, no. People make choices. Learning to accept success after fighting everybody not believing in me from the time I was born and not taking me seriously and not taking my music seriously? Yeah, I had a chip on my shoulder. I still do, and I think that’s a healthy thing to a certain extent when it’s within control. So, no, I don’t really see anything that I could say, “Oh, wow, I wish success hadn’t happened because then that divorce wouldn’t happen.” That divorce was going to happen anyway because I was an asshole.

Okay. Well, let me ask it like this. I know that you—

You’re asking kind of young questions, just so you know.

Young questions?

Yeah, brother. You’re coming from a perspective of you having a view of what sellout means. It’s a little irritating to me, to be honest with you.

Sorry, I’m just curious because—

Let me tell you this. Let grandpa tell you this about selling out. You are a fucking sellout if you walk out of your garage or your house and give a tape to somebody or sell it for two bucks. That technically is a sellout in the world of making your music available to other people. Putting it online or TikTok or whatever the fuck people do now, that’s selling out. Honestly, I don’t believe that’s selling out, but if you want to look at just terms that people like me who’ve been to college and have degrees and can talk to you about the English language. But really, what selling out is, is when you do something that you don’t necessarily want to do but you do it because you believe it’s going to give you success, whether it’s changing the way you look, changing the way you sound, doing work that you don’t want to do, that’s selling out. And I’ve never done that.

You said that you had a lot of big labels interested in you at that time.

I did. I had 27.

I’m sure you took some bad meetings then. I’m sure you had people who were trying to make you change in those ways. Did anybody rub you the wrong way in those meetings?

Yeah, I’m not gonna name names but of course. We flew into L.A. and took like 15 meetings, flew to New York the next day and took 15 meetings. I really liked Perry Watts-Russell, senior VP of A&R over at Capitol, because he heard my music and he’s like, “I didn’t hear any hits but I loved your voice and I loved the way your songs have evolved from your demos, and I want to work with you.” And that’s what I wanted to hear. I wanted to hear someone at a major label who wanted to develop bands, because in the 90s, they were signing bands just on the strength of a single. Harvey Danger, they had that one song. They didn’t even have a record. They sent them in with a minimal budget to record the rest of a record. They didn’t even sound anything like that song, and the label didn’t care about it.

So I took all these meetings. Someone jumped the gun, and then all these offers started coming in. Before email, they would send faxes to your manager with offers. He grabbed the best one and faxed that to everybody and said, “Beat that.” That’s what was known as the bidding war. You’ve heard the term before. That’s exactly what a bidding war was in the early 90s, before email. That went on for about two or three days, and finally, I said fuck it, and I pissed off my manager, who was kind of a dick anyways. I wrote a letter and said, “Okay, I want this much money, I want this many firm records, I want tour support, buy me a van—take it out of our back end, but buy us a van with a trailer so we can tour.”

They try to give you half mechanicals. I said, “I want three-quarters mechanicals on my publishing until we hit 100,000 and then I want full mechanicals for the rest of the deal.” They were like, “Oh, wow, okay. This kid knows his shit.” And the last thing I threw in, I go, “Oh, yeah, by the way, I want total creative control over everything, and I get to produce my own records.” And poof! Out of the 27 labels, I think 21 of them just disappeared. Twenty-one or 22 of them just passed. And then the rest of the labels, I’m like, okay, we can talk. And I picked Capitol.

You said earlier you were 31, 32 at this time. You were a little bit wiser and you had a life that you needed to maintain. I feel like a lot of the record label business at that time was: let’s take advantage of 21-year-old kids who don’t know any better.

Well, of course. It still is. It’s always been that. Or: let’s take advantage of the Black kids. Let’s give Fats Domino and Little Richard 500 bucks and a Cadillac and take all their publishing forever. That’s just corporate greed and you just have to be aware of it. One of the things I think that you’re getting at, growing up in L.A. and Hollywood and the punk rock scene there, I saw a lot of bands who were friends of mine get signed and never put out a record and get stuck by record labels. So I did learn from watching.

Did you have any mentors at that time?

No. I watched people and I listened to interviews, and certain people would say things, like the guys in the Replacements. Paul [Westerberg] would say things and I learned from that, because I was a big fan. I was a big fan of Hüsker Dü, X, R.E.M., Jane’s Addiction, and a lot of the bands from the 80s that were the precursors to the 90s alternative bands.

So just watching the mistakes of others.

Watching what they did right and watching what bands did wrong.

I’m assuming with this deal, you got a bigger production budget than you had ever worked with.

That is the most severe understatement. [Laughs]

Well, whatever you paid for it, it’s worth it because I can’t tell you how much play I still get out of Sparkle and Fade. And when I listen to it, it does this amazing thing where it sounds very distinctly like 1995, but it also sounds just like incredibly timeless. Can you tell me about the production process?

We got signed and I went and visited some studios all over the country. I went to Smart Studios and I really liked the fact that it was a smaller town and there wasn’t a lot of distraction. So I booked that, with me producing. I hired this guy Mike [Douglass] who had done a couple of punk rock records that my manager at the time knew. I hired him to record it and I had a production deal with this guy Brian Malouf. Nothing came of that production deal of the demos we did but I was locked into it, so he got to mix it and got a point off the record. It was contractual. In hindsight, I wished I hadn’t done that. Well, actually, at the time, I wished I hadn’t done that, but I did, and I had to live by it.

When I went in to record that, I had looked at the studio and I had made a lot of notes that I wanted four different drum sounds. So I was going to move the drums around the room to get a little bit different drum sound. Whether it made a difference or not, I heard the difference. We had rehearsed the hell out of the songs. We drove across country, made a video for “Fire Maple Song,” which was going to be on the re-release of World of Noise that got remastered by Capitol. We drove to Madison, Wisconsin, played a couple of gigs along the way, and just recorded the record.

And it was interesting because I had never met Butch Vig. He was upstairs working on this new project, and he would come down and listen. And he’d invite me to come up and have a cigar. I’d never had a cigar before, but I’d listen to his stuff, and I’d bring him some tapes of what we were doing downstairs. He’d make comments, and I’d make comments on his stuff. He was working with friends of his that co-owned the studio with him and also this girl from Scotland that they had never met, Shirley Manson. They really liked her voice and they’d send her tapes and then she’d record vocals and send them back. That was the beginning of Garbage, but they didn’t even have a name yet. So I would go listen to that with him.

Something that still strikes me about Sparkle and Fade is that it’s such a fast record.

I don’t even know if it’s 40 minutes.

Well, not even the length of it, but the speed. Genres are kind of goofy, and I wouldn’t necessarily call it a punk rock record, but it’s fast in the way a punk record is.

There’s strong punk rock in there. But it didn’t sound like… See, this is where the young thing comes in, where you categorize and departmentalize what punk is. All these people do this. Bullshit. Guys my age and older than me would fucking kick your ass.

Yeah. I feel like my generation is the one that got really into micro-genre-ing everything to death.

And that’s why I said “young.”

Since Sparkle and Fade came out, obviously the music industry has completely changed in just about every way. As someone who lived through it, if you had to single out the most positive change and the most negative change, what would they be? And how have you managed to adapt to it all?

It’s changed in a lot of ways that are subtle and a lot of ways that aren’t so subtle. CDs are gone, pretty much. We’re gonna make a new record next year. I’m already writing for it. But vinyl outsells CDs like six to one now, and I think that’s a good thing. It used to be pulling teeth trying to get Capitol to do vinyl. It was in my contract and it kind of pissed them off. But I go, “It’s a dealbreaker. You gotta do at least 500 pieces of vinyl.” So they did, and they did it for World of Noise, clear vinyl. Sparkle and Fade, green vinyl with an insert of a red 45, and then So Much for the Afterglow, blue vinyl. And then for the fourth record, Songs from an American Movie Vol. One, I sent them the artwork and they go, “We’re not doing it.” I go, “What do you mean you’re not doing it? I’ve sold like five million records. It’s in the contract.” And they’re like, “Fuck you, sue us.” Really? You’re going to sue us over 500 pieces of vinyl? It was that much of a waste of time to them. Now, they make huge money off the vinyl. We’re doing a 30th anniversary of Sparkle and Fade this year, and the main thing they wanted to talk about was the vinyl. [Laughs]

Isn’t that funny?

Yeah. So that’s a good thing. There’s a lot of bad things. For a while there, it looked like the whole Napster thing was going to be a positive thing, because you could sell less records and make more money, because you have more control over it. But then when streaming came on, labels worked out deals with streaming companies, publishing companies worked out deals, and they left out the artists. So now you can stream, just for an example, our last record that we put out in 2015, Black Is the New Black. We had deals with Pandora, Spotify, all these different people. In the first week, [it streamed] 2.8 million copies of the record. The full record—not just songs, the full record—2.8 million. Do you know how much money I made from that?

Like, 2.8 cents?

Six hundred and fifty-three dollars.

Jeez.

Fuck getting rich. Fuck all that. How do you make a living doing that? Bands my age are touring and we’re doing VIPs and we’re selling merch. That’s how we make a living. It’s just adapting. You adapt. Adapt or die, man.

Well said.

I didn’t come up with that. That would be Darwin. [Laughs]

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.