Stream: Steady Holiday, ‘Tangerine’

Kevin Bronson on November 20th, 2020

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** NOTE: We have updated this post with the Isaac Ravishankara-directed short film for “Tangerine,” which came out Monday, Nov. 23, and features narration by Nate Dern. For contextual reasons, we recommend watching them consecutively:

When we last heard from Dre Babinski’s musical vehicle Steady Holiday, she was hitching a ride on the back of a mail truck, in the interest of “Living Life,” thereby providing some sorely needed pre-election sunshine.

Besides its insouciance, “Living Life” was notable in Steady Holiday’s artistic arc: After two albums of softly sung, engaging indie-pop one might describe as bookish, everything about the song was bigger and bolder. And that goes doubly for the new single “Tangerine,” the latest from her forthcoming album “Take the Corners Gently,” arriving in February and produced by Blake Sennett.

Citrus is her metaphor of choice for a song built on a chase-scene-worthy piano line that most definitely does not corner gently. “‘Tangerine’ is a song about mental illness — about witnessing someone’s behavior change without warning,” Babinski says. “It can be a frightening and heartbreaking thing, and I’m still learning how to understand it. Sometimes that’s easier to do with abstractions. Like turning a difficult subject into a fruit, I suppose.”

The songwriter divulges more in her postcard. That’s right, Steady Holiday has started a postcard club, which might seem like a quaint pursuit in 2020 except that tactile things seem pretty comforting right now.

“Where is the sweet spot between too much and not enough?” she asks in the latest mailing, in which she holds forth on what she calls “The Cake Effect” — “a phenomenon in which the function of a pleasure variable becomes sharply inverse due to overuse.” Not that pleasure is a bad thing, she says, “but I do think it’s worth asking ourselves why we do what we do, and how we know when we’ve reached the point of diminishing returns.”

So the song “Tangerine” arrived amid an episode of “The Cake Effect,” written “instead of dealing with a chaotic situation that was happening in my life … and to deliberately avoid a reality that I didn’t want to face,” Babinski says. “It felt productive and justified, until it didn’t. ‘Tangerine’ is one of my favorite songs to date. But it also feels like a reward to some kind of bad behavior. Too harsh? I don’t know. I’m still trying to find that sweet spot.”

There’s a short film arriving for “Tangerine” next week. Look for it (if you haven’t seen it already by pre-saving the single).

In the meantime, Steady Holiday invites your thoughts on how to find that sweet spot by dropping her a postcard: Steady Holiday, P.O. Box 411511, Los Angeles, 90041.

||| ** Update: Here is the short film for “Tangerine”