Bay Area four-piece French Cassettes are back with a groovy new tune, “Santa Cruz Tomorrow,” from their forthcoming record Rolodex. After frontman Scott Huerta was living under a stairwell in San Francisco, he nearly had a nervous breakdown and called upon his bandmates to start the LP-making process. The result is surprisingly peaceful.
“Most of the song came from fooling around on my friend’s Omnichord, which has a sound that’s pretty hard not to love,” says Huerta. “So I tried to keep that charm when writing the rest of the track’s instruments. I was obviously sleep deprived to feel like singing about the end of a past relationship and a fifth grade project I made on the Donner Party in the same song. As well, I had just asked my roommate what the hottest pepper in the world is, and wanted to slip that into the lyrics at the beginning… ‘So. Carolina Reaper.’”
Along with the track, the band is sharing a video, which features magic, planets, and lots of dancing. “When thinking ideas for the video I recalled how one of my favorite musicians said they once wanted to write a hundred songs for an album and fell short,” he continues. “So I thought it would be funny if someone did the same thing but went on national television to brag about it first and could only finish one.”
“I had a great time jumping into Scott’s lucid dream to create this 16mm hallucination,” the vid’s director Vanessa Pila adds. “Scott’s a great dancer, whether he wants to admit it or not. He told me in confidence that he could fly—so naturally I made sure we caught it on camera. Also, really loved the way the animations turned out—created by my Chilean friend, Sebastián Bisbal.”
Rolodex arrives December 11 on Tender Loving Empire. Watch the video for “Santa Cruz Tomorrow” below.
