Lexie to Release SAN MIGUEL EP and Share New Single SWIMMING

Portland, Oregon based indie-pop songwriter Lexie has announced her follow-up EP, San Miguel, for a November 6 release. The announcement comes on the heels of her debut album, Halcyon Days, released in June of this year. With the announcement, Lexie shares 'Swimming,' a song about reconnecting with sexuality after cancer.

The track, written by Lexie, was recorded at engineer Raymond Richards' Red Rockets Glare studio in Portland, with producer Alex Callenberger, and was mastered by John McEntire (Tortoise/The Sea and Cake).

'For me 'Swimming' is an expression of the energy I felt when really crushing hard on someone, and finally feeling present in my body again. Connected to my sexuality,' notes Lexie. 'I was coming out of what was basically an eighteen month period of my life where my sexual self had been dormant. I'd survived cancer, enduring chemotherapy, radiation and massive surgery. The chemo wrecked me physically and likely pushed me into early onset perimenopause. As I began to heal from treatment, my marriage began to dissolve, marking the death of a ten year relationship with my husband and bandmate. So not only did I not feel disconnected to my sexuality because of the chemo's toll, my heart was in exceptional pain going through divorce. I literally wondered what desire would look again, if I would ever feel it again. I did, I do, and that's 'Swimming'. That's the record.'

San Miguel begins where recovery ends. Halcyon Days was written through cancer treatment and the end of a decade-long marriage. This record is about what came after: returning to her body, and to desire. In her words, it is about 'returning to myself fully and wholly,' and 'what it means to be sexually alive in my body.' You can hear the moment it turns. 'Heck yes I'm back,' she sings on 'Swimming'... 'my body screams for more.'

The songs gathered between the summer of 2025 and the spring of 2026, not as a concept but as a run of moments. The turn came in Italy. 'It was there that I really felt like, oh, my sexual energy is back,' she says. Walking a valley near Lago Maggiore with her cousin, a free spirit in her early twenties, they came down a river after a few glasses of wine and stripped off to swim past a startled Swiss couple. 'Nothing happened. We literally just went swimming in this river, but it was so spontaneous and so adventurous.' Swimming became the album's private word for being alive. It surfaces everywhere, an open invitation: 'You feel it now, you're swimming too.'

Desire runs through the writing as its own kind of defiance. On 'Delta Park' she is 'in my black bathing suit,' drinking a beer, thinking about someone she is not supposed to want. 'They say I'm not supposed to. They say I'm not.' Then one detail undoes her: 'You grabbed my arm at the Delta Park. I was cut open by the stars in your heart.'

'Lover's Touch' arrived almost by accident. She was coaxing a bumblebee trapped against a set of century-sealed arched windows when a dream came back to her: someone she had been crushing on, standing behind her, those same windows thrown open. 'So I sat down, picked up my guitar, and out came 'Lover's Touch.'' The song keeps the image. 'All the doors we thought were shut, they open wide.'

She built the album in Portland with Callenberger and Richards, chasing sounds she calls 'dirty and sexy' and using whatever the room offered. A drum machine she had never worked with. A rubber bridge guitar on 'Swimming.' The Orchid synth across the record, pedal steel, a real Wurlitzer, a Hammond B3, timpani. 'If I was dancing, it was a good sign.' 'Swimming' itself was torn down and rebuilt after she heard the first version and knew it was 'totally wrong. The sounds, the groove. I felt strongly that what we'd first attempted to capture was not what the song needed to be.'

Not all of it dances. 'Worthwhile' references her time of chemo and being in a hospital, where she spent her thirty-ninth birthday. 'You talked me down from my fear of dying without doing anything worthwhile.' She kept crying while recording it, and re-sang the choruses at the very end to make them softer and more vulnerable. 'It's not your fault. I almost died.' A quiet winter song sits among the rest as a kind of prayer of forgiveness. She knows a record is finished, she says, borrowing from Martha Graham, when she is left 'queerly, divinely dissatisfied.'

It is the freest she has felt making anything. 'I've never made anything like this.' She wants listeners to walk away 'high on life, on themselves,' ready to move, maybe a little turned on, back in their own bodies. 'I feel like I'm just getting started.'

San Miguel track list

01. Swimming

02. Lovers Touch

03. Delta Park

04. Worthwhile

05. Electric Feel

Photo Credit: Heather Cantrell