Alex Amen is sharing new single “California Blues,” the track is off his debut album, Sun of Amen, available June 12th via ATO Records. Amen has is also announcing additional North American tour dates, appearances include, Analog Reunion, Green River, Winnipeg Folk, and End of the Road, while supporting Kurt Vile in Vancouver and headlining shows of his own in New York City and Los Angeles.

“”California Blues” is a song I wrote years before I ever lived in California that somehow expressed the things I felt living there years later,” says Amen. “More than any other song made during my time in California it touched on the balance between excitement and isolation one can face when they chase their dreams out West.”

After taking up piano at four (and studying with the same Houston-based jazz pianist through the end of high school), Alex Amen started playing guitar in mid-adolescence after discovering the likes of Nirvana and Neil Young. Although he later enrolled in film school in California with the intention of making documentaries about rock climbing (one of his lifelong passions), he dropped out after one semester to focus on music full-time. Within weeks, he’d moved into a historic commune in Anaheim where he soon started his first band, a psychedelic folk-rock outfit named American Slang. “The commune was a crazy place to live—there were hippies and punks and skaters, all in this beautiful house that used to be on six acres of strawberry fields but now it’s surrounded by strip malls,” says Alex. “The house was owned by a professor who’d bought it in the mid-’60s and still lived there with his family, so it had this fascinating history with the anti-war movement and renowned civil-rights/psychedelic activists from that time. We’d have these big communal meals every day and debate art and God and food and politics. It was a pretty amazing place to live for a while.”

Says Amen: “I think it’s important for everyone to have a physical connection with nature, partly because it creates more of a desire to make sure we’re not destroying the planet, but it’s also good for humans on every basic level to move and be outside,” he says. “It’s the same thing with music—I think I’ve been very blessed in the sense that music has always been something I’ve done because I love it; it’s never felt forced to me. I really just love the way it feels to play music, and I’ve found the more you chase it and live with an open heart, the more life brings you songs.”

Alex Amen 2026 Tour Dates

Sat. May 16 – Healdsburg, CA @ Analog Reunion Festival
Sat. June 20 – Greenfield, MA @ Green River Festival
Wed. July 1 – Vancouver, BC @ Commodore Ballroom (w/ Kurt Vile and the Violators)
Fri. July 10 – Sun July 12 – Winnipeg, MB @ Winnipeg Folk Festival
Fri. July 24 – Kingston, NY @ Tubby’s
Wed. July 29 – Brooklyn, NY @ Elsewhere Rooftop
Mon. Aug. 10 – Seattle, WA @ Tractor Tavern
Tue. Aug. 11 – Portland, OR @ Polaris Hall
Thu. Aug. 13 – San Francisco, CA @ Rickshaw Stop
Fri. Aug. 14 – Ojai, CA @ Deer Lodge
Sat. Aug. 15 – Los Angeles, CA @ Lodge Room
Thu. Sept. 3 – Sun. Sept. 6 – Salisbury, UK @ End of the Road Festival

Pre-order Songs of Amen by Alex Amen HERE