Back in 2015, I was lucky enough to hear Francesca Blanchard perform at a small outdoor event. The moment I heard her voice, I knew I had to ask her to work with me. I sent her some of my music, and soon after we began bouncing ideas back and forth to find the direction of our collaboration. Both Francesca and I have a complicated relationship with pop. There’s so much that we love and that inspires us in the infectious hooks and buttery chords dominating the airwaves, but at the same time, we also want to forge our own paths, somewhere fresh, new, and relatively detached from the mainstream. For this project, we decided to embrace the many aspects of pop that we love, by stepping back to appreciate and enjoy some of our favorite influences from the past couple of years. "Alive" tells a story of cloudless summer nights with a forbidden love—a theme that mirrors Francesca’s and my relationship with pop music.