Alex Izenberg Was Almost a Teen Rock Star. His Second Chance Is Here.

On his 12th birthday, in April 2003, Alex Izenberg went to Guitar Center to jam.

He was the prankster of his Los Angeles public school, a high-strung and mischievous kid who hated class but loved rock ’n’ roll. He dressed the part, too — a small, cherub-faced boy with a poofy brown mop tucked beneath a top hat, a black Stratocaster slung across a velvet vest. At Guitar Center, his friends marveled at his best Hendrix, and he attracted a famous listener, too.

“I’m checking out, and I think, ‘Whoever’s playing has a really cool tone, a great feel,’” Linda Perry, the former 4 Non Blondes singer and pop songwriter, remembered in a phone interview. “I’m expecting to see some older dude, seasoned. But I see this dorky little kid in high-water pants and big glasses. I was in love.”

Perry wanted to know everything: Were Izenberg’s parents musicians? Where’d he learn to play? Did he have that rig at home? When Izenberg chuckled and said no, Perry bought it for him, plunking down $5,000 for a “fiesta red” Fender Relic and a Marshall amp. She left her number, too, so he started calling, imploring her to see his preteen trio, Din Caliber. “It was a mini-Zeppelin or Beatles, all virtuoso-type geniuses,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK, I’m going to take you guys in.’”

Izenberg raced down a trail of teenage stardom. He shifted to home-school to focus on music. Perry introduced the band to a producer. The group changed its name to Paper Zoo, cut an EP for her label and toured with Roger Daltrey in 2009. But at 18, Izenberg left the band because its retro-rock no longer excited him like the indie-rock that had become an obsession — Grizzly Bear, Animal Collective, Fleet Foxes.

Bad news soon ballooned. His longtime girlfriend left. His parents split, and lost their house. He moved in with his grandmother. And there, in the speckles of the popcorn ceiling and in the reflection of the TV screen, he began seeing faces. In 2012, at 21, Izenberg was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“I was barely able to get out of bed because I felt targeted. It was terrifying because I didn’t know what was going to happen,” Izenberg, now 33, said on a gray morning in his green backyard outside Los Angeles. “The diagnosis was terrifying, too. There was a stigma: ‘Oh, stay away from that person.’”

For Izenberg, the last 15 years have been about regaining the sort of youthful verve that mesmerized Perry and his classmates. He has released a mound of music under several aliases, including three albums under his own name on the British label Domino. By his own admission, however, he lacked the confidence to invest fully in them, to write and record the kind of album he could put on his small shelf of favorite LPs: Yes’s “Close to the Edge,” Bon Iver’s “22, a Million,” Pink Floyd’s “Meddle.”

On a recent Sunday night, he beamed as he finally placed “Alex Izenberg & the Exiles” — an album of psychedelic country-soul, out Friday, that offers a playground for him to contemplate his own mind — into his personal canon. “When I was younger, I had thoughts like, ‘I’m going to headline the Hollywood Bowl at 25.’ It worked out a little differently,” he said, smiling sheepishly as he scratched his beard with one hand and lofted an American Spirit with the other. “I realized you don’t have to subscribe to someone else’s version of who they think you are to be happy.”

Izenberg lives in a white bungalow in Winnetka, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley. After growing up in Studio City, he and his mother moved in with his grandmother 10 minutes from here in 2011. During nearly a dozen years there, he was isolated, cut off from a close group of creative friends who had built their own youthful scene.

“His whole world was just his grandmother and mom for so long,” said Greg Hartunian, a childhood friend and musician who had admired Izenberg’s cool since they met in a skatepark when they were 8. “He didn’t have any access to young people.”

Izenberg was anxious, unsure what would happen when his grandmother was gone. “That situation always loomed over Alex, and his mental health was constantly affected by feeling insecure in his housing,” said his older sister, Jessika Schonberg. “It’s Maslow’s Hierarchy, right? He needed that foundational place of safety.”

In late 2021, Schonberg and her husband left San Diego and bought a place in a nearby neighborhood big enough to accommodate Izenberg and his mother. Given his diagnosis and sensitivities to noise, wind and heat, she worried he’d been coddled, and taught him to do laundry and buy groceries — seemingly mundane chores that afforded him agency. He decorated his room with candles and Cubist paintings. He has two playful black Chihuahuas, Lady and Ruby, who impart secondhand confidence: “They’re small but mighty,” he said. “I want to be that way.”

The move coincided with an interest in philosophy, particularly the perseverance of the Stoics. In April, Izenberg’s iPhone’s background was a string of millennia-old quotes from Seneca and Epictetus, like “We suffer more in imagination than in reality.” He has fallen asleep to Alan Watts lectures in his room, surrounded by lit candles, every night for the last several years. He began inviting friends over to eat crusty bread and hear talks in the backyard. “A lot of them had this unshakable sense of self,” he said of the Stoics. “That’s what I took.”

The affirmation arrived on time. Izenberg had one more album left in his Domino deal, one last chance to use the label’s resources to make something memorable. Hartunian produced “Caravan Château” (2020) and “I’m Not Here” from 2022, a tedious process since the pair played so many parts themselves, even on unfamiliar instruments. Izenberg was impulsive, wanting to get the music out quickly, as if trying again to chase those teenage ambitions.

Hartunian told Izenberg they should slow down and build an expert band of old Los Angeles friends. He also insisted Izenberg stop writing love songs, to put away the memory of a girlfriend he’d lost a dozen years ago and lean into his penchant for philosophy: “He realized a lot of the thinkers he wanted to emulate were going inward instead.”

There was one last change. This time, the label convinced Izenberg to send the sessions to Phil Ek, an indie-rock mainstay who had worked on several of Izenberg’s most beloved records, for final mixing. He had one, maybe two, chances to suggest changes per track, forcing him to relinquish some control.

Izenberg has, paradoxically, never sounded more himself than on “Exiles” — funny and ruminative, delivering surrealist images and solitary visions in a tone so relaxed he seems to be rising from a perpetual nap. Horns and harmonies frame nearly every song in a neon glow, while pedal steel evokes existential bittersweetness.

Above the crunchy country funk of “Pareidolia,” Izenberg sings of the I Ching and schizophrenia, dual pieces in his lifetime of chance. He mourns the past and pines for a future during “Dreams of Déjà Vu,” the drums like a steady hand on his shoulder. “I stopped being afraid of what people would think,” he said. “More than ever, I did it for myself.”

When Izenberg lived with his grandmother, he would often sleep until noon. But as Ek mixed “Exiles” in Seattle, Izenberg began waking up around 7 a.m., chasing a big glass of water with a tall cup of coffee. He loved the calm and quiet, the excitement and sovereignty as he blared Yes alone.

That habit has stuck. He talks now about finding a place of his own and maybe a girlfriend, a first since those teenage days of missed stardom. He knows “Exiles” most likely won’t get him to the Hollywood Bowl, but perhaps it can allow him to pursue independence.

“Life doesn’t always make sense; oftentimes, it doesn’t. I was trying to capture that ineffable quality, the force that makes the world go ’round that nobody can put their hands on,” he said, lighting another cigarette. “Life is weird, anyways. Who cares if it gets a little weirder?”