Beyond its pool party-ready exterior — the frolicking flute, the sunny tenor — Gardens & Villa’s new single “Underneath the Moon” shimmers with bittersweet subtext.
The song, the first new music from the Santa Barbara-bred band since their 2015 album “Music for Dogs,” is on the surface “a light-hearted song about finding love when you thought it was gone forever,” the bands says. They add: “Kahlil Gibran once wrote, ‘Love, like death, changes everything.’ We’ve learned first-hand that love is the only way to counter death, as we’ve recently lost some of our closest guiding lights.
“If we look hard enough we can find it all around this crazy blue sphere, in the warmth of the summer and the beauty within each other. This song is about the feeling that everyone has felt or hopefully will one day, discovering a love that gets your heart beating again and fills you with hope. Whether just for a moment or if you’re lucky, forever, when you fight for love, suddenly you’re confronted with real beauty in the night. ‘Underneath the moon’ your heart can feel light again.”
It’s been eight years since Gardens & Villa — then fresh-faced kids — spent the summer making their debut album in Oregon, with the late Richard Swift producing. Now with four original G&V members reuniting (Chris Lynch, Adam Rasmussen, Dustin Ineman and Shane McKillop), they’ve pressed restart.
The flute’s force is strong within “Underneath the Moon,” which is as downright pretty as anything Gardens & Villa have released over three albums, and certainly a little tonic for these tumultuous times.