SOMA Magazine SOMA Film and Music Issue Aug 15 | Page 77

How do you know when you’re ready to record a song?
When we finished “The Heart Always Breaks” as a group, we
were like, “That’s it. There’s nothing else we need to do for that
song.” “Over & Over” originally started on synthesizer, and then
I played it on piano when we recorded. It changed more when
Martin Kinack produced and mixed the record by himself. It was
changing all the way until the very end. It’s different for each
song, but it’s instinctual.
Is it hard to cut away things that you’ve done before and
do something new?
No, I would say it’s even the opposite. This record felt like a rite
of passage as a songwriter. There are a lot of trends and cycles
that go on in music, like how right now the nineties are big. I
reflect everything that I listen to and hear, and we all do, but
at the same time I’m also just doing what feels right. I asked
myself why am I doing this, why am I writing music, why am I in
a band? And the truth is that we all do it because it’s something
that we need to do.

After the band recorded Heavy, Kramer road-tripped from New
Mexico to Sacramento under wavering clouds and blue skies. He
then created the music video for the title song: iPhone footage
from New Mexico and DSLR footage from Sacramento were
manipulated with a friend’s VHS circuit-bent toy and edited further in Final Cut. As a result, there is a fuzzy, psychedelic quality
to the video, a pulsing vision of the present through the lens of
the past. It is colored with nostalgia, and California Wives seems
to embody this pull of old and new in both music and visual
media. “I found myself going back to my roots,” said Kramer.
Take a look at the EP’s cover and you’ll see a photograph of his
mother in the seventies. It seems only fitting to search for stability in times of the greatest upheaval, to honor your foundation
and build upon it.
www.californiawives.com

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