"California"

"California" is about living in a small town that you dream of escaping. I wrote this song when I was in a time in my life where certain friends had completely changed and became people I did not want to associate with anymore. The line “they try to lie, they try to tie, their sh*t right back to me” really captures exactly how I was feeling at the time.

The people I used to be so close with were constantly making dramas themselves and wondering why their life was so full of it. Once I finally saw what was going on and stepped away from this group of people I realised how toxic they really were, and because I moved away they then resulted as blaming me for causing such drama. Once I was not attached to this group, my life became drama free, but I knew that this group still and will forever be living for their own dramas.

The song was really a wake up call. I realised how desperately I wanted to get away from these people and how I dreamt of a new scenery. It was winter when I wrote this song so of course I dreamed of sunny California to escape to! I found the track created by Feelo online and the song instantly came to me.

I feel like that’s when you know it’s a good song. When it writes itself and you truly connect to it. This song was written for myself as a way of expressing what I was going through at the time but I knew it would connect to other people, who were also feeling trapped in their hometown! Some people would not understand the lyric, “I think I need a holiday, somewhere brand new, far from the bay” as the bay is what my home town is called.

The cover for the single is ironic too; the palm trees in the shot were actually taken three years before I had written the song and was walking home after finishing a shift at my old retail job. The palm trees were not in California but in fact in a little park square in my hometown. When I was thinking about the cover for the track, I thought this image suited it even more because of that irony that song is about getting away to Cali, and the image of palm trees look like they were taken in California but they are actually taken in the town I song about wanting to leave.

I do want to at some point create a music video for this song, when I listen to it I think of vintage summer aesthetics. Think Lana Del Rey mixed with iconic summer beach shots. Waves, bikinis, love heart shaped glasses, and of course palm trees; with a vintage grain affect running over the film. A date with the time stamp in the left hand side of the footage. I feel as though the video would be easy to create, it’s just find the time and of course waiting for summer to come back around as we are now heading into Winter again in New Zealand.

A lot has changed since this song was written. I grew as an artist and a person. I made new friends, made improvements on myself, and pretty soon will be moving to a new city. No, not California, but who knows what the future holds? In that sense, the song was almost a manifestation of what was to come for me and I find that so inspiring and exciting that music can create that!