Lexie Covers MGMT's 'Electric Feel' on Upcoming EP SAN MIGUEL

Portland, Oregon based indie-pop songwriter Lexie has shared her blissed out, autumnal take on MGMT's 'Electric Feel,' featured on her upcoming EP, San Miguel, now due out December 4. Lexie recorded San Miguel at engineer Raymond Richards' Red Rockets Glare studio in Portland with producer Alex Callenberger. She will be previewing and supporting the record with a series of Oregon dates, culminating with a performance January 18 in Portland, supporting Kimya Dawson at The Jack London Revue.

Discussing the inspiration to reimagine 'Electric Feel,' Lexie notes, 'I first heard MGMT in a shoebox apartment in New York City the summer of 2006. My friends and I weren't sure if they were The Management or MGMT. We had a bootleg CD with MGMT written on it in sharpie, and it had like six songs. It must have been the 'Time to Pretend' EP. Those songs, and subsequently 'Electric Feel', marked a time in my life where there was a lot of uncertainty, right after college, but also a lot of discovery and what felt like freedom ... or learning something about being free. And so the power of music, holding memory ... and those sounds.'

'Here I am 20 years later, playing around with 'Electric Feel' on a parlor guitar I keep in an open C# tuning. Hearing it in that tuning made me so emotional; I wanted to hear it with the band. We covered it at my 'Halcyon Days' album release show back in June. People liked it. A lot. My nostalgia felt removed, probably for the better, and in its place was something else I wanted, something a little more dirty, a little more sexy. Making a recording of it felt like something I had to do, and thankfully Alex was down.'

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 the record's lead single, '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.'

Tracklist

01. Swimming

02. Lovers Touch

03. Delta Park

04. Worthwhile

05. Electric Feel

Photo Credit: Heather Cantrell

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