Boulder DJ Evoke Struggles Through Addiction, Rehab to Find Himself as a Musician
by Tim Wenger
Withdrawal. The term does not seem to bring to mind much other than misery, sorrow, longing. Not many can say that the word itself represents a positive time in their lives. But for Alden Groves, it represents a new beginning.
“The album is drawing parallels between my experiences with addiction and my experiences with relationships,” says Groves, a 20-year-old Louisville EDM artist who has taken the word Withdrawal and plastered on the label of his debut album that dropped January 22 on SectionZ Records. “Lyrically, most of the songs are addressing the other person in a relationship and they’re also me talking to myself about withdrawing from a substance, like you’re going to come through and you’re going to be better because of it.”
Groves takes aggressively angry lyrics and aims them at a past version of himself. After struggling with heroin as a teenager, he has used music as a driving force to get his life back together. “I’ve been clean two and a half years,” he says. “For about four years, I had used basically anything you could name. It started with drinking and smoking weed, and it pretty quickly turned into ecstasy.” From there, it just got worse. “I happen to have the brain chemistry that progresses to wanting more and more, and pretty quickly I ended up on the harder shit.”
Ecstasy is a well-known party drug, and for Groves it opened the doors to the rave scene, which soon consumed his life. A downward spiral ensued, landing him friendless and at the brink of having absolutely no one left in his life. “For me, I had to hit a point where I realized I didn’t have anything else going for me,” he says. “All my friends didn’t want to hang out with me anymore because I had stolen money from them. My parents were fed up with me. I was basically just doing drugs.” The plummet continued until Groves was finally able to look around him and notice that everything, and everyone, that he had once had in his life was now gone. At rock bottom, he gathered his wits enough to approach his father. “I really didn’t have any friends left, and then ultimately I had to tell my day ‘I need help.’”
He was put into an in-patient rehab program for two months, where he cleaned up and gained a strong system of support, with much help from his father. “He helped me get into a treatment program,” Groves says. “And it did take a lot of treatment.” After the in-patient program, he spent six months in a sober living home with others in a similar situation. “After that I was able to begin living a more clean lifestyle.”
At this point, music re-entered Groves life, this time playing a much more positive role than the raving he had done previously. He had been singing for most of his life, but fell out of it when he started partying. He began singing again once his body had regained health. As another hobby, he started playing the video game Guitar Hero, getting so good at it that his father offered to buy him an actual guitar if he was willing to commit as much time to it as he had the video game. “I just had to focus that same addictive, repeat it over and over again, philosophy onto doing something productive,” Groves says. “Once I got a guitar, I could easily do that. Once I got clean and quit smoking and my lungs got back to normal health, I realized I should start singing again. I’ve been practicing on the daily ever since.”
During his party days, Groves had begun dj’iing, largely because “I could be fucked up and still do it,” he explains. “Once I got clean I was like ‘Wow, this is really simple.’” He set a goal to grow his musical ability, and put himself out into the scene. These days, he has taken his skills in the EDM world and mixed it with live vocals, creating a sound that gives his music appeal not only to the dance crowd but to many who otherwise shun the idea of electronic music. “Electronic music with vocals is something that isn’t done a lot, and what’s awesome about electronic music is that the possibilities are endless,” he says. “What that also means is that you are looking at this huge blank canvass. You can do anything.”
After doing some sober teen events as a DJ, Groves hopes to step out into the live performance realm in Boulder and Denver. He also has an album out. “My plan right now is to do some dj’ing with live vocals and a little bit of guitar,” he says. “I’m trying to do the electronic thing but making it not like I’m in this box alone and no one can see me.”
“At some point I’d like to go to college, but at the moment I’m going full delusional and chasing the dream,” Groves says. “I’m putting everything into it because the way I see it, that puts me a step ahead. I’m not trying to do hi-tech stuff. I’m not trying to create these really detailed stories. What I’m really trying to do is convey these emotions that I’ve experienced as accurately as possible so that people can relate to it.”
Online:evokehop.bandcamp.com/
Category: Buzzworthy2
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