Album Notes

Seemingly out of nowhere, The Hotel Alexis have emerged like a thunderstorm across the plains of American song. Having delivered a heartbreaking first record full of haunting, mesmerizing songs, the band embarked on a series of riveting live performances across the country. Founder and singer/songwriter Sidney Alexis (aka Sidney Lindner) cut his teeth in bands like Torrez and Josh Ritter’s band before going on to form The Hotel Alexis in 2003.
Alexis had been collecting stories and images as he moved from Paris, where he was born, to a seemingly endless series of towns big and small across the US. As he wandered through the record bins at various music shops across the land he began to realize that the records he was looking for were ones he would have to make himself. Ending up in Portsmouth, NH, Alexis settled in to make the music that he had been dreaming of and to fill his songs with the stories he had been collecting. Soon, he would have a batch of songs that represented a whole swath of American life that was being neglected in song.
Originally self-released in late 2004, The Shing Example Is Lying On The Floor has topped many critics top-10 lists of independant releases from 2005 after it was re-released by Broken Sparrow Records in the spring of 2005.

"This record is just so completely beuatiful and utterly heartbreaking it's a little hard to know how to describe it in a way that does it justice."- Aquarius Records, SF, CA

"This album is the audible equivalent of the suns warmth on a too frozen face-the thaw that soon turns to hope, then to total revival"-SCTAS

"The most pleasant surprise of the year"-Dustedmagazine.com