Poolside
Poolside’s Jeffrey Paradise has always had a tenuous relationship with music. Even before his breakout with 2011’s massive “Harvest Moon,” his is a decades-spanning journey that’s played out in fits and starts. From his musical childhood in sunny San Diego to his college band with The Rapture’s Luke Jenner and Vito Roccoforte, his time as an indie sleaze DJ darling and headmaster of San Francisco bloghouse-era parties, the timeline of his career shows Poolside as but the latest in a long line of successful sonic explorations. But it’s taken those 20-odd years of preparation—and as many years spent adamantly rejecting mainstream expectations—to bring Paradise to his ultimate place in the sun. “I've spent 15 years being like, ‘fuck your rules,’ and I finally feel like I'm not trying to prove anything or anyone wrong,” he says. “It’s just pure, unfiltered expression, and that’s why I'm really excited about this record.” On Poolside’s fourth studio album Blame It All On Love, Paradise leaves the shallows and enters the depths of his own creative voice. Its 11 tracks are funky, soulful, laidback and full of hooks that elevate Poolside’s sound to poignant pop heights. Rather than flex his electronic muscles, the production marks a return to his live music roots and finds ease in simple and radiant layers of sound, even as it comes face-to-face with the complex reality of one’s dreams come true. “There’s a theme of thinking you found something and believing it's going to work, but there’s always that Shakespearean dark side you don't know is coming,” he says. “There’s a shadow side to everything when you pursue the things you love. Whether it’s romance or ambition, there's always this trade-off of harsh realities that comes with it.” From the beginning, Paradise saw music as a rebellious act. Growing up an outsider, he first found his scene among the skateboard set. From that culture sprung a love of DIY, punk and all things “other than.” Soon he was playing guitar in his own high school band, cutting his teeth opening for major acts and headlining local venues. When the dream of making it big died with graduation, he sought bigger scenes in the hills of San Francisco and found his first musical soulmates. With Jenner and Roccoforte, Paradise formed The Calculators, and though he didn’t dare hope for major- label success, he found freedom in the band’s sound and raucous club shows. “The Calculators was me exploring what seemed really interesting, which was combining dance with punk rock energy,” Paradise says, “three chords, a guitar, bass and drums combined with synthesizers, drum machines and weird electronics. That's always been exciting to me and feels like it will always be an edge you can push; combining modern technology with antiquated technology and making something that hasn't quite been heard before.” It of course didn’t last forever. Jenner and Roccoforte broke up the band and moved to New York City to start The Rapture, pushing Paradise into his first “break up” with music. Fleeing the
band scene, he started working at a record store and learned to DJ. He soon made an international name for himself as the up-and-comer who dared to mix Pulp and New Order records with Dutch electro and Chicago house classics. “That was a pivotal time period where I got rid of the notion that some genres of music are lame and others are cool.” Paradise saw a vacuum in San Francisco for clubs that would book his emerging DJ buddies. Designed as “a safe space for anyone who felt out of place,” Frisco Disco became a haven for the city’s artists, queer community, scenesters and fun-seeking fringe dwellers. Booking future superstars from A-Trak to Steve Aoki, Paradise eventually found he had to expand. Frisco Disco became Blow Up; a brand that booked young stars from Skrillex to Porter Robinson, and continued to explode well into the 2010s. Unfortunately, it was that level of aggrandized success that turned Paradise off from the project. “It was moving further and further away from why I started doing music,” he says. “It just felt like the mainstream. It went from the early days of Frisco Disco with all these outsiders being like, ‘We have no place to go. This is home,’ to being like, ‘These are the jocks.’ I’d been fighting so hard to do me and not get a ‘real job,’ but all of a sudden I might as well be wearing my fucking uniform to work and have a boss who's like ‘Play these songs.’” Paradise responded to the world’s dubstep-oriented obsession with slow-pace disco and love songs for summer days. An unplanned overnight hit, Poolside was born from a weekend making whatever he wanted with his friend Filip Nikolic. Things got serious when LCD Soundsystem frontman James Murphy asked for a 12-inch vinyl of their Neil Young cover “Harvest Moon.” “Essentially we were trying not to succeed as much as possible,” he says, “and the world had other plans.” Hits came fast as the “daytime disco” sound honed itself on debut album Pacific Standard Time and sophomore LP Heat, but soon after that, Paradise found himself once again questioning his direction. Nikolic left the duo, and Paradise likewise took a year off from Poolside to explore other passions, but the same truth kept punching him in the face. “I read all these books that said ‘if you had $10 million in the bank, what would you do?’ and I'd been fucking doing that,” he says. “So finally I was like, ‘what if I was cursed, and everything I’d work on for the rest of my life was going to fail, what would I do?’ And I was literally fucking pissed, because it was still music. “I think that's been the limitation up until recently, being vulnerable,” he continues. “For the first time in my life, I'm giving my all to music. I wanted to avoid ever having to say I didn't have what it took.” He returned to Poolside as a full-on solo project and started exploring what his vision could be without any holds barred. On 2020’s Low Season, he was still just “figuring it out,” but with Blame It All On Love, Paradise says he’s finally “comfortably in that place.” A writing session with Cut Copy bassist Ben Browning helped refresh his headspace. The friends wrote four loose demos in two days, spending just enough time on each to find a cool
groove without lingering long enough to get caught in the muck of perfection. It was a “turning point” for Paradise, and happily, all four of those songs—“Ride With You,” “Moonlight,” Lonely Night” and “Sea of Dreams”—made the final record. “It felt like jamming that led to something rather than a producer making a song,” Paradise says. “It was a pleasure to make this record. I never felt like I'd been hitting my head against the wall. It really did feel how I felt in high school and early college when there wasn't a backlog of material or even knowledge to judge myself by.” But just like life, when you’ve reached the top of the roller coaster, the ride takes a serious turn. Most of the album was written and recorded as Paradise’s new home in the hills of Malibu. It’s a gorgeously unique artist’s abode, built by actor Tim Matheson and bought by Paradise and his girlfriend from Ernest Hemingway’s granddaughter Mariel. The eccentric midcentury hideaway is full of asymmetrical curves, one-of-a-kind built-ins and colorful touches. From its place atop the Malibu hills, the couple enjoys wide views of the Pacific Ocean and the lush countryside surrounding them—but six months into their dream-home life, they fell into a living nightmare. One night while driving home after a party, Paradise found two motorcyclists bleeding on the side of the road right by his new house. They were victims of a hit and run, and while he waited for police to arrive on the scene, a young woman came out of the bushes, screaming that she’d seen the whole attack and was herself escaping from the perpetrators who’d been holding her hostage in an abandoned house that just happened to be his new home’s closest neighbor. Paradise did his best to help everyone on the scene, and as soon as he could, he ran home to move his girlfriend and friends to a hotel where they could spend a few nights away from the chaos. The criminals were still at large, and a few weeks later, police came by to investigate. One thing led to another, and the shocking conclusion was that the woman who Paradise had helped for hours was in fact the motorist who hit the men on motorcycles and also the head of the kidnapping racket holed up in his neighbor’s empty home. “That happened at the midpoint of writing this record,” he says. “Me and my girlfriend move in together and buy our dream house. It was supposed to be this great time, and six months later, it’s one of the gnarliest.” For months, Paradise became obsessed with stalking the neighboring home, working on tracks during the day and retiring to the patio with a pair of binoculars to keep tabs on any suspicious behavior. Everything from his relationship to his sense of security was suddenly full of tension, and that irking sense of unease made its way into Blame It All On Love’s otherwise sunny sound in the form of sonic distortion. “There are three things I used a lot of,” he says. “One is from RadioShack and costs $50. It's just this overdrive sound, but it's a really unique distortion, and then these two Alesis reverb boxes. I put a lot of stuff through this distortion, which normally I wouldn't use, but it became the sound of the record. There’s this friction to it.”
The song “Sea of Dreams” encapsulates this perfectly, matching the distorted guitar sounds and warbled synths with lyrics that paint a picture of a man who’s drowning in expectation and a never-ending desire that’s never quite satisfied. The jazzy and soulful “Ventura Highway Blues” with Life on Planets likewise tells of the trouble love can get one into and how beautiful those troubles can be. From the seductive swing of opener “Ride With You” to the synth-laden sing-along of “Moonlight,” the half-time emotional grandeur of lead single “Each Night” with Mazy, and the retro-drenched lofi closing ballad “Lonely Night" with Munya, Blame It All On Love incorporates all the sweet things that make a straight-up, easy to love song and blends it with romantic melancholy. The video for “Float Away” depicts the most personal portrait. Filmed in the very home where Paradise and his girlfriend now reside, it also features the musician’s beloved car, a 1970s Fiat Spider that he keeps in working order, and his converted Airstream studio. Surreal and warm, it’s the perfect visual accompaniment to the strange middle ground that Blame It All On Love so happily celebrates. “I feel pretty lucky to be in the struggle because I realized that being in the struggle of where you want to be has meaning,” he says. “There are challenges when you pursue what you love; and the heartache behind that is interspersed in the album. I think I'm at a mature enough place in my life where these don't catch me as a surprise. There is human error, and that’s something I always put into Poolside. I guess that's my rebellious act now.”