Video: Matt Costa, ‘Sharon’

Daiana Feuer on May 14th, 2018

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In July of last summer, Matt Costa hunkered down with Peter Matthew Bauer (The Walkmen) and Nick Stumpf (French Kicks) to record “Santa Rosa Fangs,” his new album arriving May 18 on Dangerbird Records. It’s a concept album inspired by traveling and living all over California. “I’ve interwoven my own stories into a fictional idea of what ‘Santa Rosa Fangs’ is … seeing the landscape and where life can pull you within one state,” Costa says. “It is all these things — the ‘bite that is eternal, the smile in the neon’ — and it has fangs.” The album follows three siblings, a young woman named Sharon and her two brothers Ritchie and Tony, who both die in separate accidents.

“Sharon” — which will be chiming in your head the rest of the day with its Tom Petty-esque cadence — “is the rock song I’ve been dying to write from the start of my career,” says Costa. It delves into the central character’s grief as she confronts her own mortality with pockets full of pills. “It’s the characters’ story and my story, too, contemporary but still tortured by the past,” he adds. “It’s a window into a time period but spoken as if it’s the present. The beauty of love and loss doesn’t have a date on it; it’s timeless.”

For the video, Costa and director Pamela Littky took a roadtrip to Montana’s tiki-themed Sip ‘n Dip Lounge at the O’Haire Motor Inn, that’s been around since the 1960s and has mermaids swimming in a pool behind the bar.

||| Watch: “Sharon”