Songs about: California
My California Queens!
All the leaves are brown and the sky is grey… I’d be safe and warm, if I was in LA…
- California Dreaming, The Mamas and The Papas
Longing, loss, and dreaming to be somewhere else are very common points of inspiration for songwriters. Couple this with the desire for an American flavour of fame and fortune and you end up with lots of songs, as I’ve discovered, about California. Songwriters and artists might well be writing these songs before they’ve ever even been to California, but as we’ll learn not all of these songs are dreamy, positive songs about making it in the entertainment capital of the US.
California Dreaming in my eyes is the blueprint for all of these following songs. Written by John Phillips and Michelle Phillips during a chilly winter in New York, John and Michelle were in the band the Journeymen which was a sort of pre-curser to The Mamas and The Papas. The song’s autumnal imagery, melancholic guitar and flute, and the vocals with the ghostly repeated refrain on each line build together to give this atmosphere of sadness and longing. The message in the song is that things are better out on the west coast in the year-long warmth and sun. The song swims with this dreamy nostalgia, the warmer tones which suggest the autumnal colours in the song also hint at the afterglow from the warmth of the California heat.
I’ve always loved this song and have some early memories of hearing it as a kid (not when it first came out, of course, I’m still so young!) but in the 90s I seem to remember there was always adverts on TV for CDs of 60s music compilations. This one was always on there, so it really got stuck into my subconscious. I remember also that at school we all had to sing this song as part of the choir. I remember our music teacher telling us to act out the feeling of the music, the people in the song were miserable that they were so cold, so we had to express that in our singing. This idea made an impression on me, that it wasn’t just what you said, but how you said it that communicated the meaning behind the words.
California I'm coming home
Oh will you take me as I am?
- California, Joni Mitchell
Continuing the expression of creative freedom and counter culture that was flourishing in the state in the 60s, Joni Mitchell’s incredibly famous album Blue also includes a song dedicated to California. Again this song is written in a state of exile from California, this time in Paris (sort of more glam imho?!) Mitchell longs for the freedom of her groovy west coast home as she sings us the story of her pretty typical North-American takes a trip to Europe narrative, taking in goats on Greek Islands, red dirt roads in Spain, and a park in Paris which is too old and cold and settled in its ways.
The message is clear, Europe is good for a strange adventure but the home for creatives, the place where they can feel free to make music, is California. This idea as well of will you take me as I am? is another part of the freedom musicians long for there, to be free not just creatively but to live a life without judgement, without the old and cold settled ways of Europe.
This thread continues into the more recent female singer-songwriters that I’ll be focussing on. Of course, this isn’t an exhaustive list and is prejudiced exclusively by my own musical tastes.
I'm heading to California
Don't say I didn't warn you
I'm milking what I can from this grief
- California, CMAT
CMAT’s second album kicks off with this drama-filled song where the narrator is dealing with a break up by turning the grief into something creative. As the song goes on, the narrative of the break up is turned into a book, then a film.
CMAT has a habit of kicking off her albums with songs about sodding off to America, her first album starts with the beautiful Nashville which treads similarish ground. Again we see how California acts as a symbol for creative freedom, it acts as a goal for creative people in the west as the destination where you are called when you’ve made it, as a singer, writer, actor.
California acts as an easy way to evoke these ideas of creative success, picking up on the themes that are embedded in our culture from the counterculture moment from the 60s and The Mamas and the Papa’s California Dreaming.
What’s interesting about CMAT’s take on this is the final lines, mentioning Jake Gyllenhaal and Kristen Schaal (what a gift of a rhyme those double aa’s give us!)
California, oh, whoa (I'm writing up a book about us)
California, oh, whoa (they're gonna make a movie of it)
California, oh, whoa (they're gonna cast Jake Gyllenhaal)
California, oh, whoa (and I'm Kristen Schaal)
California, oh, whoa (they're gonna do it with a Coen brother)
California, oh, whoa (set it in Wicklow with your mother)
California, oh, whoa (oh, no, it won a Razzie)
California, oh (it's all for nothing, should've just tried being happy)
Another brilliant rhyme is Razzie / happy. The creative project created to work through the grief of the failed relationship may have made it to La La Land and been made into a movie, but the movie turned out to be absolute shit and ended up winning a Razzie, the annual award for the very worst in film making, set up as the arch nemesis of the Oscars, and often held on the same weekend.
The song ends with this admission that maybe going there wasn’t actually worth it and the singer of the song should have just tried to be happy where she was instead.
California then, may not be all its glamorous golden starry reputation suggests.
'Cause I was never told that I wasn't gonna get
The things I want the most
But people always say, "If it hasn't happened yet
Then maybe you should go"
- California, Chappell Roan
Chappell Roan’s California is one written not from a place of wishing to be there, of dreaming of creative freedom and success, but actually from being there already and struggling to make her career a success. The song is about wanting to leave California after moving there for her career, which hadn’t yet caught on to the huge extent it has very recently. There is a rawness and honestly in this song which again picks up the melancholy of The Mamas and the Papas, there even seems to be a reference to that song in the chorus:
Come get me out of California
No leaves are brown
I miss the seasons in Missouri
My dying town
- California, Chappell Roan
Where as the The Mamas and the Papas were longing for somewhere away from the brown leaves, Chappell Roan longs to be taken away from the sunshine state to somewhere where the seasons change. No leaves are brown (!) The song is beautiful and one of my current favourites, having inspired me to write this entire article about songs about California. I think there is such raw courage in it to confront this idea of success that is pervasive in our culture, that all creative folk really want to go to LA and make it. Chappell Roan is bravely exploring the reality of that journey and the struggles of trying to get any level of success in her singing career. She’s done the hard thing of leaving her home for this huge unknown place where she’s trying to make it as a singer and it’s not happening and other people who are there are supporting her doubts: But people always say, "If it hasn't happened yet /Then maybe you should go"
Talking of La La Land, it is similar in a way to the film which has, possibly, not aged well since its smash hit Oscar winning era back in 2016/17.
We love these stories, for sure, in a way it gives us all hope, in true dramatic fashion, just when everyone’s given up hope, the main character through tenacity, hope, or accident ends up getting the big break that they’ve been working for.
At the time of writing this song, Chappell Roan was already starting to grow momentum as a successful artist, after years of struggling she was finally recording her debut album, but you can see from the emotions within the song that those doubts about whether success would happen to her were real. Looking back now we can see that it did, but the Chappell Roan writing the song could never have guessed this.
California then is indeed a place as well as an idea. Funnily enough the PR that the entertainment industry has been putting out since the turn of the 20th Century about California seems to have worked. It is a place where you can be creative, where maybe your dreams can come true. The reality is different though, as anyone who has walked down Hollywood Boulevard will tell you, or seen the netflix doco about The Cecil Hotel. These songs tell us that so many of us long to go there, however once you get there, drawn by promises of endless summers, you may, like Chappell Roan, miss the brown leaves and the changing seasons.
Honourable mention:
California - Phantom Planet: the theme tune to the teeny 2000s extravaganza The OC the chorus of which screams California, California, here we COME!!!!!
Another song about people travelling there with these hopes of fame and fortune, like millennial Dick Whittingtons.
