Call Me When You Get To California

It was an innocuous enough message, typed out hastily as my father’s plane was taxiing in Australia. “Call me when you get to California”, said ostensibly to continue the argument we were in the middle of. With the benefit of hindsight I don’t recall what it was about, because the next thing I was thinking was “That kinda has a nice ring to it.”

California had become a recurring theme in many of the songs I was working on at the time, something that started when I found myself in Los Angeles for work in 2017. Stuck in a lifeless apartment in Downtown LA, I had brought a guitar with me to keep me company, and it wound up coming in handy.

In his book of short stories and essays Pure Drivel, Steve Martin has one piece on how miserable New York writers are in LA. I haven’t read it on a long time, and I can only imagine it mercilessly takes the piss out of said writer in the piece, but I still can’t help but relate, and believe the joke is the other way around. I’ve never liked LA. I don’t like that you can’t walk anywhere. I don’t like that there aren’t any seasons. I don’t like that the bars close at 1am. As if it were some sort of Costanza-esque opposites exercise, Los Angeles has always been to me what happens if you take the greatest city in the world and go as fast as you can in the other direction.

I say this with lots of friends in LA, from Culver City to Silver Lake — you should go by my buddy Rex’s café Little Ripper next chance you get. And I’m under no illusion public opinion on New York is universally glowing, it’s just the place that fits me. As the protagonist of the song says “If that’s the life you want, who am I to say what’s right or wrong?”. He’s making his own terrible choices, and more hours of sunlight is not among them.

I just listened back to the original demo which, as far as I can tell, I recorded very quickly, probably just to get a guide track to the band to play. It’s twee and a little folky, all of which went out the window when Stan Harrison showed up to play saxophone (in true New York fashion he was a recommendation from my therapist). Stan immediately brought a life to the song that was there but it was buried, and as we worked through the solo I finally knew how the song had to end. I sang a line back to Stan, he played it, and then took it somewhere else, in the opposite direction in fact to the well-intentioned but ultimately ill-conceived refrain of the song’s title. I’d say like bad Rodgers and Hammerstein, but then in a weird twist for a New Yorker, I can’t stand Broadway either.

Each song on the album has a moment like that where one of the players on it brought something that I could never have thought of and couldn’t live without once I heard it. In Stan’s saxophone was the sound of the person in the break-up who is instantly (and incorrectly) convinced they’re better off without the other. As I’m trying to eke out the last “Call me when you get”, channeling my best Can’t You Hear Me Knockin’ Jagger impression, Stan’s saxophone brings all the braggadocio that I started in the words but found in the sound.

And it became the opening track that would open an album that is ultimately about falling apart, and maybe falling back together. Of course you don’t always know you’re falling apart at the time do you? The character in the song is oblivious.

Or maybe he’s just doing the opposite…