[Cover photo credit to Timothy Tuech]
Transylvanian-born artist Alex Kilroy has long pursued American music. Now a Blues-Rock guitarist and singer/songwriter, he has released his debut album, Break My Chains.
The album arrives following the release of the title track “Break My Chains” earlier this Spring and the recent single “Let The Good Times Roll”, featuring Vince Gill.
The album was Produced by Tres Sasser, recorded in Florida with a band, mixed in Nashville by Joe Costa, and mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound.
Kilroy comments:
Break My Chains is about breaking the chains of trying to be somebody else. Breaking the patterns in your own mind. Realizing you’re a soul having a human experience.
Kilroy was born in the Transylvanian town of Bistrița to a musical family. His father, Iulian, had been a guitarist before turning to management, and his aunt was a nationally recognized singer who competed in Romania’s Eurovision selection. He did years of classical piano training inside Romania’s conservatory system before everything changed one summer when his father imported a car from the United States with a DVD inside, Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Live at Montreux.
Kilroy recalls, hearing the record:
It clicked. That’s me. That’s what I want to do.
By his teens, Kilroy was fronting a Stevie Ray Vaughan tribute band performing across Europe. At twenty, after raising money through wedding gigs and even appearing on The Voice Romania, he secured a scholarship opportunity at Berklee College of Music’s summer program. Though finances prevented him from enrolling full-time, the trip marked the beginning of his eventual move to the United States.
From there came Chicago Blues clubs, visa complications, months back in Romania waiting for paperwork, and eventually Nashville, where Kilroy rebuilt his life.
Eventually he relocated to Florida, where a meeting with industry veteran Clyde Harris and his partner Pat Armstrong helped bring years of ambition into sharper focus. Now Kilroy feels he is “finally telling his own story.”
