Everyone could use a getaway right now.
Fear not, because Luna Shadows and In.Drip. are here to deliver you a true Californian getaway in digital form. The +1 Records label mates have been working together behind the scenes for quite a while, and today they make their in-tandem-debut with “Palm Springs” an ethereal synth-pop number about the famously infamous desert town of the same name. I caught up with the two of them just hours ahead of the track’s official release Wednesday.
Interview by Andy Gorel
Photos by Larsen Sotelo
AG: So you just premiered the music video for “Palm Springs” on Billboard which you filmed in Palm Springs. How did that collaboration come about? Both song and video.
LS: The song was one of the first times we ever hung out actually. Right?
ID: Yeah, it was super early on.
LS: It was really on, and I’m the one that came in with the idea. I was like “Yo, today’s the day. I’ve been sitting on this idea forever.” And I just felt like ID had the right energy for it, being a native Angeleno. I knew he could bring some authenticity, and had really good perspective when writing this song. We wanted it to be both earnest, like we genuinely both love this place, but it’s also kind of self-aware and tongue in cheek.
ID: Yeah, since I grew up here, I have the perspective of a native. Like if you’re a resident of somewhere, and people go on vacation there, it’s very clear who the tourists are. Palm Springs is a really popular place, but Coachella is a worldwide event. My high school got Mondays off for Coachella. This place has been a part of my life for a long time. So for me, having the culture built in, I definitely understood it. I didn’t really realize that perspective was different til I got older… having Mondays off for Coachella. Like all of my friends started going at 14.
LS: It was really cool to have a local’s perspective because I’m the opposite. I’m the tourist. I’m from New York. I showed up in LA, and didn’t even know what Coachella was at the time. My friend James was like do you wanna come to this festival with me. I bought my ticket day-of. This was when it was only one weekend. It wasn’t sold out. It blew my mind. Then obviously in the next ten years it progressed to this mass exodus. If you’re not at Coachella is kinda empty and eerie. That in itself is some crazy kind of thing. I felt like I wanted to share this experience with people somehow, because not everyone gets the opportunity to go. I wanted to make it accessible visually and sonically, to kind of invite people to festival season via this bizarre song.
So for the recording, we just sat there all day with Thom, our other collaborator, and we just went through the entire trip to Palm Springs. We literally mapped it out, and we talked about everything that we could remember seeing on the way down once we get there. It was very visually-driven. It was also a very true collaboration. ID wrote the verse melody, Thom wrote the pre-chorus melody, and I wrote the chorus melody. So it kind of has all of our melodic voices in it. When we showed it to the label for the first time, they were like “This is so crazy it sounds like three different songs. So we kind of had to work hard to somehow fuse them together.
The video was kind of a thing where we were just like “Oh, we just want a vacation. Let’s book a fun weekend in Palm Springs, and then it escalated. It was like “We can do some really cool photos. Let’s bring a couple of friends. Wouldn’t it be cool if we did a lyric video?” It just got so out of control, because we had so many ideas. And then we just did a full-fledged production. I think In.Drip. was probably like, “uhh.. I didn’t sign up for this.”
ID: It was not a vacation.
Andy: Why was it so hard? What did she have you doing?
ID: Oh nah, it wasn’t that hard.
LS: Tell him about the pool!
ID: Yeah, she had me get in a pool. (LS laughs) It was, you know, unheated, and it was winter. So it was probably like 50 degrees. And then she was like (imitating LS) “Uh, you know, actually I’m not gonna get in. I don’t think that suits the video… after I shot all my parts in the pool (laughs).
AG: You got duped.
ID: I know.
LS: I said I was gonna go in and then I didn’t (laughs).
Andy: What else did you guys do out there?
ID: Well we did video one day, and then we did all the photos on a separate day. But we really just worked. It was cool because the locations we shot at were really cool. Palm Springs feels like another planet. It’s really its own thing. It was still fun and cool to be out there, but in terms of other things we did in Palm Springs… I got a jelly donut.
AG: Have either of you ever been to the Salton Sea? Pretty wild place.
ID: Yes.
LS: I haven’t. He was recommending that we shoot there, but we just didn’t get an opportunity to. We talked about shooting there but ended up going with a more classic Palm Springs aesthetic. What’s crazy about the video is it’s a very very very low budget video. We did not have very many resources. We got so lucky in that we had an amazing crew and team, and everyone went above and beyond, and that the location spoke for itself so much. We had both been there before so we knew what we wanted to do in general. But a lot of it was just “Ok, drive to this field. Jump out of the car. Hopefully nobody else is there.” It was very guerilla shooting, but fortunately everything was pretty vacant, and it worked out.
AG: So why Palm Springs?
LS: So we just announced the name of my album, Digital Pacific. A lot of my music has this centralized Californian theme. I wanted to do something else that isn’t just LA. I wanted to think a little bigger. So I thought, “Where does LA go on vacation? What’s the next frontier?” I just thought about Palm Springs. It’s been a hugely influential place. I feel like unlike other cities, that have major anthems dedicated to them, Palm Springs doesn’t have shit. Like LA has so many songs. And it’s just such a visual place, I thought it would be a fun thing to immortalize in musical form.
AG: So Luna, you have an album and a tour on the horizon. In.Drip. what about you?
ID: I’ve got a single coming out in May, and then pretty much every six weeks I’ll be releasing a single.
LS: I also wanna say, In.Drip. was very helpful with a lot of the creative direction in the video. One thing that was his idea, that inspired a lot of the video, was to have us doing synchronized newspaper flips with the beat of the song. And from that idea, we got this bigger idea to do a lot of other synchronized motion. We’re never interacting but there’s this sense of connectivity between us. He was also the prop master for this video. He got the binoculars. He found that map of California. He really went to town in this store, and on a low budget. He went to all the stores in the valley and hunted the shit out of these props.
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