Alex O’aiza (oh-EYE-zuh)is about two things: hits and heritage, often finding himself at the intersection of both. The pop artist was born in Dallas, but spent his formative years in Morelia, a small Mexican town, before moving back to Texas for grade school.
“I grew up knowing all my neighbors and the little shop owners,” he says. “My first record was a pirated CD from this band called Reik. I just fell in love with it.”
Reik is a Latin pop rock band that was known for stripped-down acoustic ballads. O’aiza’s most popular single, “How Your Love Feels,” draws heavily from that well, with more than 1.1 million streams on Spotify.
O’aiza wasn’t always churning out hit singles. In fact, he was reluctant to start his musical journey in the first place. As a child, he begrudgingly obliged as his mom put a violin in his hands and signed him up for school choir. During his sophomore year of high school, he picked up a guitar for the first time.
“I had a crush on this girl, and if I learned guitar I could impress her,” he jokes. “I learned it pretty fast. I could play songs by the end of the summer.”
Soon after, he began writing songs and posting them online. O’aiza attributes his strongest musical influence to The Maine, an American alternative rock band. Around the end of his high school career, the band was scheduled for a show in Houston. He didn’t have the means to go on his own, but his mom offered to take him — under one condition.
“My mom found out that there were live auditions for this show called La Banda,” he says.
La Banda is a Latin singing competition show where teenage Latin artists perform in front of a team of judges that eventually selects five finalists to become a boy band together. Auditioning for it was a bold decision, yet again spurred on by O’aiza’s mother.
“I had to prepare last minute for this audition,” he says. “It was three songs in Spanish and one in English.”
Photography by Julia Cartwright
O’aiza made it through multiple preliminary rounds of auditioning, eventually performing in front of a producer that encouraged him to play his own original songs instead of the covers he had rehearsed. Scrambling to choose from his limited work at the time, O’aiza played a nameless song he wrote just two weeks before.
“I just play it, and I look up, and the guy’s bobbing his head,” he recalls. “He looked at my dad and said, ‘Sir, with all due respect, your son needs to focus on music.’ That’s when it clicked with me: I think this is what I need to do. One day, I hope I can see that man again. I hope he’s still out there.”
Given the push he needed, O’aiza began to dedicate all of his time to writing and producing his own music. To date, he has released 16 singles and a 2020 EP, Out Of My Mind. Recently, he has begun to phase in Spanish songs to his discography, honoring his upbringing with two upbeat tracks titled Eres and Adios Tal Vez.
“There’s a lot of pieces of me that come out more whenever I tap into that side of my life,” he says. “I just grew up in that community, and I want to honor it. Going through this journey and showcasing that part of me further emphasizes the importance of those people.”
O’aiza has found that the more he understands his heritage and past, the more he’s able to orient his future. He puts a heavy emphasis on giving back to the people who invested in him before he realized his own potential. No matter how he continues to grow as a person and artistically, he will always be indebted to those who got him here in the first place.
“Amazing things just don’t work without people,” he says. “Being bilingual, I can spread that message.”
