Gardens & Villa have been KCRW favorites for years now. For about as long as they’ve been releasing music, we’ve been playing it. I remember hearing “Orange Blossom” (one of their earliest recordings) from several of my colleagues, and thinking “Ooh, I can’t wait to get my hands on that one!” The track “Fixations” from their last full length Music for Dogs is among my top 50 favorite songs of the past five years.
So you can imagine how delighted I was to receive an email directly from the band asking if we’d like to premiere the video for their ultra smooth new single “Underneath the Moon.” With it’s laid back synth-pop groove, the song already beautifully conveyed the feeling of a really good late night out with someone, or several someones that you really like. The video amplifies this feeling in an incredibly charming way.
Here’s songwriter Chris Lynch on how the video came together:
“We made this video in one night in our neighborhood and asked strangers to film us in the bar! The result is unpolished to feel like a documentation, showing the story of someone finding love after thinking it was gone forever (what the song is about), it is based on a true story! We all feel weird/different at some point in our life, and hopefully everyone can feel at least once in their life this great complete thing that is finding true love – your other weird one. Love bridging differences. The vampire in the video is a naive and nice one! He does not realize he is scary (because he is different) but he keeps going to find the one. Until he does… We got inspired by What We Do in the Shadows, this great fake documentary about the everyday life of vampires. It made us want to make a comedy vampire film. Right now we want to share a message of compassion and lightness during this heavy time when actual bad vampires are roaming around us!”
Gardens & Villa have a couple of upcoming shows in Southern California that you should definitely check out. I heard a rumor that Lynch may be dressed as the vampire from the video for at least one of them…
October 13th at Soho Restaurant and Music Club in Santa Barbara
October 19th at Zebulon
Carousel and header photos: Steven Perlin