Santa Rosa Fangs is a stirring, stunning,
and cinematic look and listen into the sometimes autobiographical, sometimes
fictional journey of the venerable California musician Matt Costa through the
tangled groves and grapevines of his home state.
Throughout the album’s
twelve songs, Costa illuminates what he has learned and how he has grown in the
past 15 years of his career. His music has taken him around the world, allowing
him to work with diverse, respected artists and to connect with people
everywhere—from his albums released on Brushfire Records to recording with
Belle and Sebastian in Glasgow, to penning film scores and releasing a variety
of genre-bending EP’s, and to finally coming home to Los Angeles’s Dangerbird
Records for his first new proper full-length release in nearly five years. A
rebirth in a sense, through his keen pop sensibility, studious songwriting,
technical mastery, and a modern-meets-vintage sound bursting with bite, Costa
has recorded the album of his career, one sure to reach new shores and sailors
alike.
The tale of Santa
Rosa Fangs centers around a young woman named Sharon (as told
through the shimmering chorus of the eponymous Costello-meets-Petty lead
single), her two brothers Ritchie and Tony, and their story of love, loss, and
coming of age in a timeless yet contemporary California. It is replete with
long distance love affairs and nostalgic romances woven through the loom of
tragedy and time. According to Costa, the titular teeth refer to that
inescapable feeling of a romantic, tragic, and eternal bite that certain places
and events will always hold on us.
He began the recording
of Santa Rosa Fangs over a year and a half ago, though some
songs here predate that mark. Over the past few years, Costa had challenged
himself to explore new terrain, from the acoustic-fingerpicking/lo-fi
garage/experimental sounds of 2015’s EP’s to the acid-washed and reverb-laden
soundtrack to the film Orange Sunshine to another complete
album that never saw the light of day. Realizing he sought a collection of
dyed-in-the-wool songs rather than sonic experiments, in July of 2017 he and
producers Peter Matthew Bauer (The Walkmen) and Nick Stumpf (French Kicks)
entered a studio to begin work.
Costa was pushed in new
directions working with Bauer and Stumpf and cites “Real Love,” an upbeat,
heavy tune written in 5/4 time, as an example of their collaborative influence
on the album. Originally intended as an acoustic song, he was encouraged
by his producers to approach it from a fresh direction. “I had done that sort
of thing before, a Nick Drake, fingerpicking type thing,” he says. “Pete and
Nick inspired me to take it to a new place. To write a driving rock song in 5/4
is a real challenge, but I had the basis in my pattern and we all drove it home
with a really strong beat. On my own I might have stuck with a simpler take,
but it felt good to tackle some new ground.”
In another circumstance,
Costa again came up with two variations of the same song, but rather than being
forced to choose between the two, he simply used both. As a result, “I Remember
It Well” bookends the album, first as a rollicking, piano-driven number that
sets the record’s tone and pace, and second as a sparser, quiet version to end
it. The latter was the initial version and was also the first song written for
the album some four years ago.”
“I’ve interwoven my own
stories into a fictional idea of what ‘Santa Rosa Fangs’ is, from my own time
spent living in Northern and Southern California and years driving up and down
the coast, seeing the landscape and where life can pull you within one state,” Costa
says. “It is all these things—the ‘bite that is eternal, the smile in the neon’—and
it has fangs. They stick with you: the romantic, the tragic, all that. It’s the
characters’ story and my story, too, contemporary but still tortured by the
past. It’s a window into a time period but spoken as if it’s the present. The
beauty of love and loss doesn’t have a date on it; it’s timeless.”
For Matt Costa, the
world of Santa Rosa Fangs is the past, present, and future of
his life all rolled up into one long stretch of sunlit California coastline.