California Sad

Christopher Dallman

Interview by C. VanWinkle

March 24, 2022

Will you start by telling me about the piece you responded to?

It was a painting called Morrison Ave. It's a landscape that to me looks very California. That's what I felt looking at it. There's a number of cars that are either all parked or all going. I'm not sure which, but I chose to lean into both possibilities. It’s an overcast sky and a handful of palm trees.

Do you remember your first impression?

I like it a lot. I've always had an affinity for gray days. I know that's so cliché, considering so much of my work tends toward the melancholy, or it did more in the past. But I've always loved a good gray day or a rainy day. When I lived in Los Angeles, those are my favorite because the weather out there is very same same same. I'm from Milwaukee and then I lived out there for about nine years. I know it really sounds great to have 70 degrees and sun all the time, but for me it led to a sort of samey feel, so I always really loved the overcast days. Particularly, the month of June is often entirely like that. It's called June Gloom and it's when Angelenos walk around and say, “Ughh I've got seasonal affective disorder right now.” Perhaps they do in a way, but I've always really liked it. Actually, the inspiration for my response came literally immediately. I had no, I looked at it. I didn't look at the email containing the prompt right away. I wanted to look at it when I was about to work on it. I waited for that, looked at it, and immediately just went to work.

That's a cool tactic to not even look at it until you have time to do something with it.

For me, the writing process is not about marinating. It’s about releasing and not judging and following the path wherever it goes. Most of the time, you can get somewhere worthwhile. Then my marinating part is the first recording of the song and allowing that recording to evolve.

When you write songs, do you usually start with the lyrics?

I do it all at once now. When I first began writing music in grade school and high school, I definitely wrote lyrics first and then I would try to make music around it. It wasn't the most prolific way for me. I wasn't very prolific when I was young or in my 20's or 30's. It wasn’t until I turned to electronic music in my 40’s, and I stopped drinking alcohol, when the flower just bloomed. I record a lot now. Now, the way that I do it is I literally just decide to go to work, I open up the software, and I start to write a song. I make up lyrics right then. They're usually the right ones. I pick something to expound upon in a lyric or a part that I like, and I just go from there. It changes for sure, and sometimes I have to kill my darling, or I let go of parts and write new parts. But mostly, I have found that capturing the writing process itself is the more important recording. A lot of people make demos of songs: they do a sort of rough draft, then they start kind of fresh again and rerecord it to sound perfect, or just better. I find that the birth of the song is really the freshest spot to catch.

I get the impression that California Sad came pretty easily. Is that true?

Yes. My starting point is not often a title, but oddly it just was with this. I just I looked at the painting and said, “All right, that's this.” And so I just wrote that. I wrote to my first impulse, my first response, and followed each bit. It was primarily recorded all in one day. But the whole day. I work in the restaurant business, and I used to be in floor management, so I was working very long hours all the time. Now I've moved into the office. I’m building the human resources department for this small restaurant group right now. It's so stress-free and I have so much more time for music! For the first time in years and years and years, I have two days off in a row, which feels like I'm getting on a cruise ship each time. I’m like, Oh my god, I'm not thinking about work, nobody's gonna text me about, it's great! So I was able to devote a whole day to it, which I hadn't been able to do since lockdown, really. So that was good. It was an immersive day. Just stayed in that world the whole time.

This was a really remarkable experience for me. It leads me to wonder if I should do things like this more often. It really shook up my songwriting quite a bit. I don't quite know how to explain it, but the sound is very different for me. The sound produced by the choices in the songwriting is just naturally different. It was telling a story that was based on something that was outside of me. Of course, I connected with it and inserted my own experience and vulnerabilities into it, but it didn't start in here. It wasn't a mirror song. It was a vibe song.

Do you miss living in LA?

No, never. I'm grateful I lived there. It’s a really weird place; I had a lot of really weird experiences and a lot of great experiences. Overall, I found that being in such close proximity to the mainstream entertainment business, I always felt like I was on another planet. We moved there to take care of my husband's mother. She had cancer and we moved there to be with her until she passed away. We moved quickly and so we didn't have money saved up so much. Even though we felt right out of the gate that we wouldn't be there too long, we ended up being there for nine years. Returning to my hometown had never been on my bucket list, but when it occurred to us, it just made a lot of sense. And it's been great. I do visit there a lot. Josh's family is from there, so we go back. I have a handful of friends that still live there, but most of them have been driven away by fires and things like that. It's one of those places where you have to ask, “Are you sure people still want to live here?”

It strikes me as a place where you have to try really hard to live there.

Oh, it's so much effort. Last time I was there, I went out to lunch with my former boss, who's still a great friend. It took me an hour in traffic to get not very far to meet her. It took me about 25 minutes to find a place to put my car. We had lunch for 40 minutes, and then it took me an hour and a half to get back. At this point, my whole fucking day was this lunch! It was a great time, no regrets, but that is the way it used to be. You spend a lot of clock currency in your car just to go anywhere. Interestingly, people in LA hike a lot, but they don't walk to anything else. They drive to a hike. If there's a 7-11 on the corner and they need to grab something, they always get in their car. It’s bizarre. I did love it, but it’s weird. It's a very evocative landscape, I think. There are aspects of my experience there that I cherish 100%. I just knew I couldn't end up there. The whole time I was there, we had no clue where to go. Nothing was concretely pulling us, and we are not “How about here?” people. That's just not how we do. Moving here, we were able to buy a house. Out there, to any of my friends that own houses, I'm like, “I don't even know how you did that!” I think Milwaukee's one of the last inexpensive places.

Are you inspired by Milwaukee?

I suppose I must be, whether I'm aware of it or not. I was inspired by LA in the moment when I was there too. For a while, I wrote about being a failure when I was far too young to consider myself that. When I played acoustic guitar, the songs that I wrote all hovered in the same emotional realm, and they got more and more in that way, because my own physical skills were so limited and that just wasn't going to change. I'm not saying I was terrible, but my hands just don't want to do that. They just don't. It's hard work. It's like riding a bicycle, which is something I don't enjoy, because I feel like This is work the whole time. So no, I’m not lyrically inspired by Milwaukee yet. Maybe in the sense that when I moved here, I really leaned into alcoholism, so there are a lot of “I used to be a drunk” songs that probably have a bit of Milwaukee in them. I don't write those anymore; I've kind of gotten all that out. I'll tell you this, it alleviated a big amount of financial stress, and it cannot be overstated how important that actually is to creativity for me. I can't say for everyone because people respond to different things under different pressures. For me, anxiety doesn't produce good things.

Was it important to you to stick to the prompt, to do something close to home?

For the most part, I remained within the confines of what was in front of my eyes. I committed to that world, even with the visual element that I created. I worked with the video a bit to make it that color. Those different shades were very important to me. And that was because of the painting. It's a very specific Sky. It just is, even when it’s sunny. It's a very specific light there.

I take a lot of selfies now because I think it's a very healthy aspect of identity expression. Even if you don't share them, I think your view of yourself is vital. It's vital to my confidence, which is vital to my creativity. I'm not saying I have to look perfect. I just mean that presenting my exterior in a way that truly matches my interior for that day feels incredibly powerful to me. And I wish I’d gotten that light in my selfies when I lived in Los Angeles. That would be great. Milwaukee doesn't have the best light for that in any way. Milwaukee's a beautiful place, but not like LA.

Do you experience seasonal affective disorder in Wisconsin?

I don’t. I definitely respond to the winter differently than I do the summer. In the winter, I'm much more internal. We’re homebodies to begin with, but we really don't go out much in the winter. If I'm not working, I am either crocheting or eating or making music. I just need to make something always. I don't get depressed, but I get more internal and I write a lot. Then, the warmer months are when I actually like to release music. I like to make visual components for the music outside because it's a much more dynamic environment than my house. I've kind of reached the ceiling on that one, so now I'm doing Airbnb’s in my own town.

What’s your advice for someone else who may be approaching this project for the first time?

Don't judge yourself at all. Just respond and open up and let it out. I'm not saying that the thing that comes out first is the Thing, but let it come out fairly. That's my advice for creating anything. Judgment is not helpful.

Call Number: C67VA | C69MU.daCa

Christopher Dallman is a Milwaukee, Wisconsin-based singer, songwriter, and producer. He used to make sad folk music. Now he makes electronic music. Life is wild.