“Tim and I met the real Patrick and Fortunado one night at a bar in downtown LA. They were stumbling through a game of pool with the slow movements of longtime drunks. Tim wore his dad’s old Luskey’s hat at the time, and this caught the eye of Patrick as we walked in. He wanted to gamble us for the hat. We laughed him off, but he was insistent. There was a flash of menace in his face, a sudden sobriety. He pushed into Tim’s chest, but that was as far as it went. We left after a drink.

We returned to the bar later that night to find Patrick pacing back and forth along the curb outside. He’d clearly been kicked out and felt this to be a great injustice. Fortunado was sitting alone at a table, so we joined him and struck up a conversation. He drifted in and out of coherence. He gave us a hallucinatory
treatise on time travel, college football…I can’t say I remember details. What I remember is feeling that he and Patrick were joined in some mysterious way. They felt eternal in the way of all late-night characters, bending the room into their timeless reality. They stayed in my mind as characters until I
found a song that needed them.

When it came time to make a video for “Fortunado”, I knew I had to collaborate with Tim. He’s a talented screenwriter, and that was night was his story as much as mine. So we shuffled together the imagery of the encounter — the hat, the pool game — with imagery from the song into a hypnotic, looping story.”  –  Alex Dupree

Today Alex Dupree shares the video for the new single “Fortunado” (Keeled Scales). Dupree got his musical start in Austin, Texas, moved to California to focus on poetry, studying and teaching at UC Irvine, with songwriting never far from his mind. He continued to hone his craft writing country songs for both the LA band Mister Paradise and a duet project called Dawn & Dupree (with Iva Dawn of They/Live). Despite a deep love for country music, Dupree’s songs never quite settled in that category, absorbing additional influences from the likes of Laurie Anderson, Arthur Russell, Bjork, and John Cale.

Dupree’s new music is the story of starting over. It’s sturdy songwriter songs with heady, heavy folk and country flourishes. Bill Callahan meets Willie Nelson. Or Harry Smith meets Barry Hannah. It’s about coming to terms with the uncanny patterns of your life, the strange repetitions you can’t escape.