In Demand: How Alex Alvga Became Kane Brown’s Go-To Creative Director
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For the past five years, Alex Alvga’s work as creative director for country star Kane Brown has yielded a catalog of attention-grabbing, thought-provoking work, dating back to 2017’s “Heaven” music video. More recently, their ongoing collaboration includes clips such as “Worldwide Beautiful,” which garnered Brown his first ACM video of the year win in 2021, and the CMT male video of the year-winning clips for “Worship You” and “Lose It.”
“I was always the weird kid who didn’t like video games or sports,” says Alvga, who grew up in Barcelona. “I was obsessed with music and watching live concerts on TV all the time.” He recalls becoming particularly obsessed with Depeche Mode, saying he would watch all of their videos, and citing the work of their creative director Anton Corbijn as a main influence.
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Recognizing Alvga’s passion for film and music, Alvga’s father bought him a camera when he was 17. After building a portfolio on real estate, weddings and corporate events, Alvga started reaching out to band managers, leading to a last-minute offer from British band White Lies. “They wanted someone to capture their performances in [Spain], asking if I was attending their show in Madrid, which was the next day,” recalls Alvga. “I said ‘Yes,’ though that wasn’t true. I quickly bought a plane ticket to get there.”
Alvga kept adding to his resume. While on tour in the U.K. and the U.S. with singer-songwriter Jacob Whitesides, the artist’s tour manager introduced Alvga to Brown’s manager — who was seeking a videographer/photographer for CMA Fest that year. As a trial run, Alvga was invited to capture Brown’s CMT Music Awards performance (which, at the time, was held the day before the fest). “The next day, I was offered the job full time,” says Alvga. “I moved to the States with a work visa permanently two months later, and it started from there.”
Below, Alvga breaks down three of Brown’s most impactful music videos.
“Worldwide Beautiful”
In June 2020, Brown released the pivotal track “Worldwide Beautiful,” a song that promoted peace and unity during a period of civil unrest. The video’s post-apocalyptic visual — which offers a somber juxtaposition — was filmed in Mount Pleasant, Tennessee, with all the editing, color corrections and visual effects completed in just two weeks. “This was during the Black Lives Matter period, when all the riots were happening,” Alvga recalls. “To me, it was like, ‘Why all this division?’”
He came across a video online of two children playing together, which offered inspiration for the video. “I thought, ‘If we had a world where kids weren’t influenced by adults, how would the world be?’” he recalls. “There’s the opening scene with a car burning in the background, but there is a man who is so focused on his phone, and yet he has a car near him that can explode at any minute. But then you see kids playing amid all this destruction. It’s just playing with that vibe over and over — that even in devastation, kids can make the best of things.”
“Lose It”
Early on in his work with Brown, Alvga began setting the template for an arc of videos that forego much of the stereotypical imagery in country videos — the video for “Lose It” centers on a gleaming, warm desert scenes rather than country roads, with Brown driving a Camaro instead the requisite truck. “Being from [Barcelona], I had no cultural references when it came to country music,” he explains. “When I started creating videos, there were some people that said, ‘Hey, this is not going to work for country music — this isn’t what we usually do.’ When you talk about country music, a lot of people just want to do a regular video with a pickup truck, Broadway, whiskey. But Kane’s music is way more than that. I feel like we’ve been breaking barriers there and creating a new experience for country music fans, too.”
“Thank God”
The video for Brown’s latest release, “Thank God” — a collaboration between Brown and his wife Katelyn that currently sits at No. 35 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart — frames the couple’s connection and relationship. The video was filmed over two days in Oahu, Hawaii, near where the film Jurassic Park and TV show Lost were filmed. “That was an idea that Kane and Katelyn had,” Alvga says. “They wanted tropical, beach vibes for the video. They have a beautiful family with two kids, and are so young and amazing together. When you see them and spend time with them backstage, you can see that connection. I felt like the best way to do this to show them just having fun and letting them be them.”
