Today we’d like to introduce you to Alex Drummond.
Alex, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My name is Alex Drummond. I’m 27 years old, and I’m originally from Birmingham, Alabama. I’ve been singing for as long as I can remember, especially through high school and collegiate choirs, but I began playing instruments and writing my own poems and songs when I was 17.
My first serious musical project was Zoo Culture, a band I fronted for several years. We released our debut EP, Moonflower, and our breakout single, “Sundress,” has accumulated more than 7.5 million streams to date. That band was where I learned how to write songs meaningfully, perform live, and begin building a life around music. Over time, however, the group gradually fell apart. I eventually moved to Nashville and found myself rebuilding my creative and personal life from the ground up.
That period of rebuilding became the foundation for Delivery, the debut album I made with my close friend, collaborator, and producer Adam Lochemes, formerly of the band Arlie. I brought Adam the songs in their earliest forms – the lyrics, melodies, and core structures – and together we spent a year and a half expanding them into the body of work you hear today. As the album developed, we invited musicians from throughout Nashville’s creative community to contribute, and the finished record ultimately came to feature performances from more than 20 artists.
I released the album independently and financed the process through contracting and handyman work while also managing the project largely by myself. After a series of major setbacks surrounding its original release, I was eventually able to release Delivery again through a partnership with the boutique distributor Canvas, this time under a new project name: Two Sun Bower.
Since then, we’ve released an official music video for the song “Cadi,” which received airplay from WNXP and was featured on VEVO’s Alternative Rising playlist. I’m currently working on a video for another song from the album, “Postage,” while continuing to perform live and slowly developing ideas for a second album.
At this point, I’m focused on growing Two Sun Bower into a lasting project, finding the right creative and managerial support, and continuing to build a community around the music.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
There’s definitely a long, rough road behind me! One of the biggest challenges has been trying to build an ambitious creative project without significant financial backing, management, or an established professional team. I financed Delivery entirely through independent contracting and handyman gigs, often going directly from building decks or hauling junk into writing, recording, rehearsing, or managing the project. There are quite literally blood, sweat, and tears baked into the fibers of this band and album of mine. Learning how to balance survival with the time, energy, and expense required to make lasting, meaningful work remains an ongoing challenge.
The most devastating setback came shortly after the album’s original release. Fraudulent third-party playlist activity affected the project, and Delivery was removed from streaming platforms within its first month. After spending a year and a half making the record, six months releasing singles and promoting it, and paying out of pocket for everything, it was extremely difficult to watch all of that work vanish into thin air just as it was finally being introduced to listeners.
This happened during an already uncertain period in my life. Zoo Culture, the band I had spent much of my young adulthood building, had gradually crumbled, and I had moved to Nashville to begin again. Losing the album made it feel as though the new life I had worked toward was collapsing before it had even properly started.
Eventually, though, that loss became a turning point. However devastating it was, I gradually began to see losing the album as a sign from the Universe that I needed to part ways with the version of myself still tied to Zoo Culture and embrace the person I had become through my journey in Nashville. I soon partnered with Canvas, regained the ability to release the album, and chose to move forward under the name Two Sun Bower. The experience forced me to become more resourceful, more resilient, and much clearer about my intentions with music and what I wanted the project to represent.
I still face many of the same practical challenges – funding the work independently, managing the project largely alone, and searching for the right professional support – but I’ve learned that a setback does not have to be the end of the story. A lot of the time, it becomes the reason you build the next version more intentionally.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
Two Sun Bower is an independent music project rooted in emotionally honest songwriting, intricate arrangements, and collaboration. Genre-wise we take a lot of cues from electronic, folk, rock and experimental music, and we’re deeply inspired by the indie bands of the last 20 years.
I write the lyrics, melodies, and foundational structures of the songs, usually drawing from experiences that are difficult for me to express through ordinary conversation. I’m very motivated by romantic, poetic, and abstract expression in lyricism. The transformation of simply stated emotions or experiences is one of the things I find consistently beautiful about songwriting.
I then bring those early forms to my close friend and producer Adam Lochemes, and together we begin constructing larger musical worlds around them. The rest is left to collaboration!
Although the songs begin with me, I never intended Two Sun Bower to be a completely solitary project. I’m deeply inspired by what happens when people with different creative instincts are invited into the same space and trusted to leave something of themselves behind.
I take a lot of joy in creating guidelines or constraints for session players to work within while leaving their performance largely up to instinct. I also curating who works with whom on each demo based on my understanding of their character and playing style.
Delivery features performances from more than 20 musicians throughout Nashville’s creative community, each of whom contributed their own perspective, texture, and emotional language to the album. We also commissioned artwork from HARST, a Birmingham-based artist who created the album cover, and Dai Okumura, an internet friend from Japan who contributed work for the single artwork and merchandise designs.
I’ve always felt very curatorial in the way I make art. I collect words, sounds, images, colors, performances, and fragments of experience, then try to find the place where they belong together. That instinct is reflected in the band name.
“Two Sun” is my way of describing the dawn – not just the first sun that rises and sets, but the second. It is a physical reminder that you can always begin again, even when the odds feel impossibly stacked against you.
“Bower” refers directly to the intricate structures built by bowerbirds. They construct and decorate these spaces on the ground, gathering and carefully arranging objects – usually items of the same color, like feathers, stones, bottle caps, fruits, or pieces of plastic – to create a space intended for attraction and connection.
I found a lot of myself in learning about these birds and was moved by the idea of an animal collecting scattered objects and transforming them into a place where community could come together. It felt very similar to the way I approach music.
Taken literally, Two Sun Bower might translate loosely to “dawn nest,” but to me it means something closer to “a place to put it all back together”. It’s very intentionally a sequel name for a sequel project: a space for celebrating and sharing each other as we experience and become new versions of ourselves.
I’m particularly proud of Delivery because it represents that philosophy in practice. It is an intensely personal album, but it could not have existed without the community that formed around it. Though often opaque, the lyrics pull from painful, emotional, and sometimes traumatic experiences in my life, but the process of sharing those songs with other musicians allowed those experiences to become something communal rather than private.
More than anything, I want Two Sun Bower to make sincere emotional vulnerability feel valuable. This music is for people who are carrying something heavy and searching for a way to communicate it. “Postage,” for example, is about the relief that comes from being fully heard – not only having someone hold space for your feelings, but receiving acknowledgment and reassurance when you feel far away from yourself or alone.
What I hope sets the project apart is the level of intricate intention behind every part of it. The writing, arrangements, visual language, videos, artwork, and family surrounding the music are all pieces of the same world. I’m not interested in making songs that exist briefly and then disappear. I want to build a lasting body of work that gives people somewhere meaningful to place their own experiences.
Is there a quality that you most attribute to your success?
I think the most essential quality of this project is resilience. It isn’t linear – there are plenty of times when it’s difficult to keep going, and both this project and I have been through more hardship than I care to type about at this point. But every morning, some part of me still wakes up hungry and excited to explore the music of my life a little further, and incredibly grateful for the support I’ve received along the way. I can always look behind me, remember how far I’ve come and who helped me get here, and trust that if I keep moving forward, it will all sort itself out. I believe in myself and in my resilient heart; it lives in my band too, and I know it’s felt by the people who continue to follow the music.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.twosunbower.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/twosunbower/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@twosunbower
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/twosunbower
