Strawberry Guy

Alex Stephens is a singer-songwriter who creates folk oriented hazy, romantic ballads and performs them as Strawberry Guy. His music tends to be calm and relatively low tempo and manages to pull off the balancing act between sounding elegiac in tone without being funereal. Despite its psychedelic effects, the haziness in his music comes across more like a case of soft focus or blurriness akin to the impressionist art displayed in his album covers (as opposed to trippiness) ... also with a fair amount of vintage '60s folk revivalism vibes mixed in there as well. Especially the presence of the piano and the string section in his debut album Sun Outside My Window (2021) and the emotional swirl he pulls from them suggests subtle classical (or romantic, to be more exact) undercurrents in his work.