| Alex Kilroy Returns to the Blues That Started It All With New EP New Shade of Blue, Out October 23rd Transylvania-Born Guitarist Announces a Deeper, Roots-Driven Chapter With Autobiographical New Single “Crossroads On My Mind,” Out Today Stream “Crossroads On My Mind” HERE |
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| A few months after turning a lifelong pursuit of American blues into his debut album Break My Chains, Alex Kilroy is heading deeper into the music that set his journey in motion. Today, the Transylvania-born guitarist and singer-songwriter announces his new EP New Shade of Blue, arriving Friday, October 23rd, and shares its lead single, “Crossroads On My Mind.” Where Break My Chains opened outward across blues-rock, Southern grooves, gospel, pop, and melodic songwriting, the new project pulls Kilroy closer to the foundation beneath it all, embracing a rawer, more traditional blues vocabulary while continuing to push that language through his own experience. “Crossroads On My Mind” makes that intention immediately clear. Built around an unmistakably traditional blues feel, the song is also one of Kilroy’s most autobiographical recordings to date, tracing the unlikely path that carried him from a childhood in Transylvania through years of small clubs, visa struggles, persistence, family sacrifice, and eventually a life making music in the United States. |
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| The crossroads in the song are both musical and literal. Kilroy sings about being born in Transylvania with the blues already somewhere inside him, telling his parents that the dream was something he could not let go. He looks back on years spent playing hometown bars, chasing the visa that might finally bring him to America, and carrying the faith of his mother and father through the setbacks along the way. What emerges is a traditional blues song built from a distinctly unconventional life. That story has been at the center of Kilroy’s music from the beginning. At six years old, he told his mother he was only visiting Romania. He asked for an American flag and hung it above his bed in Transylvania, convinced that somehow his real home existed somewhere across the Atlantic. Born in Bistrița into a deeply musical family, Kilroy began with classical piano before a chance discovery changed the course of his life. His father had imported a car from the United States, and inside was a copy of Stevie Ray Vaughan’s Live at Montreux. Kilroy watched Vaughan tear through “Texas Flood” and recognized something in the abandon of the performance that classical training had never given him. “I could feel what he was feeling,” Kilroy recalls. “It clicked. That’s me. That’s what I want to do.” His father challenged him to learn three Stevie Ray Vaughan songs note-for-note in a single summer. If he succeeded, he could leave piano behind and switch to guitar. Kilroy did, eventually fronting an SRV tribute band that toured Europe and opening for Lucky Peterson at Romania’s Sighișoara Blues Festival while still a teenager. |
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| His father also gave him an equally important piece of advice: “You can’t be the next Stevie Ray Vaughan. He already did that.” That tension between tradition and identity has followed Kilroy ever since. At twenty, after raising money through wedding gigs and competing on The Voice Romania, he earned a scholarship opportunity to Berklee College of Music’s summer program. From there came a self-booked show at Buddy Guy’s Legends in Chicago, visa complications, months waiting in Romania for paperwork, and eventually Nashville, where Kilroy built a life through gigs, sessions, and sheer persistence. Years later, after relocating to Florida and connecting with management partners Clyde Harris and Pat Armstrong, Kilroy finally turned that accumulated experience into Break My Chains. Produced with Tres Sasser, mixed in Nashville by Joe Costa, and mastered by Ted Jensen at Sterling Sound, the album arrived this past May as a wide-ranging introduction to an artist whose blues roots were always present even when the music ventured elsewhere. The album was preceded by its title track and the original “Let The Good Times Roll,” featuring Vince Gill, and helped establish Kilroy as a guitarist equally interested in honoring the music he grew up studying and discovering what his own version of it might sound like. New Shade of Blue picks up directly from that question. Rather than attempting to recreate a particular era, the EP leans harder into the feel, phrasing, grooves, and immediacy of the blues while filtering them through the life Kilroy has actually lived. The result is a project intended to feel closer to the ground: guitar-forward, deeply rooted, and shaped by a player who spent years studying the tradition before finding his own place inside it. That idea also carries particular emotional weight following the loss of Kilroy’s father, Iulian, earlier this year. A guitarist himself before moving into artist management, Iulian was Alex’s earliest musical influence, his most persistent critic, and the person who first challenged him to move beyond imitation. His lessons about respect, discipline, and refusing to give up remain central to Kilroy’s work. On “Crossroads On My Mind,” those lessons sit alongside the memory of his mother’s prayers and the long road from Romania to the country he spent his childhood imagining. For Kilroy, the blues has always represented freedom. New Shade of Blue brings him back to that source with a clearer sense of who he is inside it. New Shade of Blue by Alex Kilroy 1. Crossroads On My Mind 2. New Shade Of Blue 3. Sacred Ground 4. Sacred Ground (Reprise) 5. Make It Stop Raining 6. Living For The City~ 7. Life By The Drop* ~Stevie Wonder Rendition * Stevie Ray Vaughan Rendition recorded on Aug 27, 2026, in memory of the life and legacy of Stevie Ray Vaughan https://alexkilroy.com/ https://www.instagram.com/alexkilroyofficial/ https://www.facebook.com/alex.musat.359/ https://open.spotify.com/artist/1r9eFD39XjzCrgtA8rycY2 |
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