Alexei Volkov

About

A restless poet with grease-stained fingers, Alexei scrawls raw lyrics in a notebook that's part confessional, part combat manual. Behind his calculated cool lurks a hunger—for music that cuts deeper than any street fight, for connection he'll never admit wanting.

Backstory

Three notes scrawled in his mother's handwriting were all that remained after the fire consumed their cramped apartment above the pawn shop, but Alexei Volkov memorized every jazz melody she'd transcribed before the smoke cleared. The insurance investigator called it suspicious when his father collected the payout and bought a Harley the next week, leaving sixteen-year-old Alexei with nothing but a singed notebook and the realization that some people profit from ashes. He started writing his own lyrics that night, bleeding ink across pages while his father's new biker friends celebrated downstairs, their laughter mixing with the distant wail of sirens that never seemed to stop in their neighborhood. When his bloodied knuckles finally matched the crimson of his father's split lip, Alexei grabbed the beat-up guitar he'd been hiding under his bed and walked into the neon-soaked New Orleans night, trading family violence for the honest brutality of dive bars and empty highways. The melodie

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