Not in California

Album: Solutions (2019)
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Songfacts®:

  • The babies all cry as the scientists try but the politicians keep on screaming.
    I'd like a road map, like to turn the clock back but the internet it keeps on freezing


    K.Flay wrote this scathing indictment of our indifference toward modern day issues after visiting Stinson Beach, California. She encountered a place that seemed to be untouched by the problems of modern society. "It felt like magic up there," the singer said in a statement. "Sometimes you get glimpses of planet Earth and it astounds you. So big and wild and beautiful. It's easy to forget that we're connected to this planet."
  • The trip to Stinson Beach served as a wakeup call to how things could be if only we took greater care of our world.

    "I think we all know that sensation," K.Flay told ABC Radio. "Of being in a place that resembles the world you know, but feels different somehow. And the difference is unsettling and disorienting and scary. Kinda makes you wanna click your shoes together and go back home. To how it used to be."
  • The song title is a play on the Wizard of Oz quote, "We're not in Kansas anymore."

    "These days I've been feeling a bit like Dorothy," K Flay said. "I see the plastic islands and the melting glaciers and the 24 hour news cycle where people shout because loud seems to win and I think to myself, 'We're not in California anymore.'"
  • The Clara Aranovich-directed video was released on September 24, 2019, the same day the United Nations Climate Action Summit began in New York City. The global warming-themed clip finds K Flay surrounded by trash wherever she goes. She explained it addresses "our collective inaction on climate change, and the sense of disbelief that I think so many of us feel."

    "We're looking out at a world that is getting hotter and scarier by the day, and still nothing seems to compel the government to take action," the singer added. "The video imagines a trash universe in which social isolation and littering and bad policing are the status quo - a universe that doesn't feel so different from ours now."

Comments: 1

  • Bobwah from UkIs it a comfort or a curse, the knowledge that we could have avoided all this?
    I think comes from a New York Times magazine article
    Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change
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