My personal music project, Pasta Ailex, dates back to 2000. I chose the moniker in that year after seeing season 3, episode 4 of Family Ties where Alex P. Keaton is preparing his eponymous pasta dish for family dinner. The hardest that I’ve ever laughed at television is when the family sits to eat and as they take their first bites, everyone groans with pleasure and compliments Alex. There’s a moment where they all get tangled up saying, “Great Job, Alex, on this Pasta Alex, Alex.” and finally Steven makes this bewildered face and everyone is scratching their heads. Alex is just beaming joyful pride! 😜

I’d been working on some music projects on my PC at the time and my nightly routine was to join the big ol’ gang at the Denny’s, where our regular waitress was this kickass chick, named Ailex. I’ve always been charmed by that spelling because i love words with vowels that require additional analysis, like Draught, Aesthetic, and Ouija. It immediately clicked in my mind that I ought to adapt Pasta Alex to represent myself and my digital music creations, in a nod to Artificial Intelligence, as Pasta Ailex! 🤘🥰😂

I also feel like it’s important and certainly meaningful for me to share that in 2009, I read Gary David Goldberg’s autobiography. As I read the book, I was just blown away by the guy’s wit and overall thinking. 

Somewhere in the book, he leaves his email address and welcomes anyone to write to him. I felt like he might be charmed by the way his work inspired and became a part of me. I didn’t expect much of a response but of course, he’s a writer! 

He wrote back, crediting Michael Gross with being able to generate humor with a change of facial expressions and talked about how much fun that episode was to work on. He concluded by saying that he never imagined there would be a musician called Pasta Ailex, but that the story makes it sounds like I am on the right path for myself and wished me good luck! 😭

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  Rob Gryder