The water, warmed by the summer sun, moves softly around your body, caressing it warmly as the open sun-kissed ocean glistens on a cloudless, lazy summer day… This is summer in the O.C. Let’s admit it, if you live in Southern California, you’re pretty darn lucky to have summer all year round! However, for those who don’t, summer won’t technically make its true presence known until June 21st– the start of the Summer Solstice!
With summer in mind, I can’t help but think of reggae! Reggae is the official theme music for those looking to experience the quintessential Golden State summer and Cali Conscious’ upbeat reggae rhythms have become my go-to jams. For 2018, the Southern California beach reggae band will be releasing a new single every month! At the end of the year, they will be running a crowd-funded campaign to compile all the singles onto an album titled, Go Beyond. Go Beyond will be their second full-length album and it’s scheduled to be released early 2019! Keep your eyes peeled for that and many other perks that they’ll come out with too. Including private music lessons, private house parties, custom art t-shirts, handwritten lyric books, and much more! Follow them on Instagram for more on that here.
Their single for the month of May is “Travel Down The Coast” and it was released May 31st! Check out Spotify to listen to their tunes in preparation for their new singles dropping each month!
“Relaxed, chilling by the sun… Enjoying the view, got nowhere to go, love being with you…” The lyrics and melodic solos created by the 8-piece surf reggae band, hailing from Huntington Beach, CA, will create a groove that will hypnotize you all summer long!
Check out the short Q & A I had with Justin Ratowsky of Cali Conscious regarding the recording process, reggae music, and what they hope we, the listeners, take from their music below!
How’s the recording process going so far?
The recording process has been really spectacular. We started recording the first two singles “One Love For You” and “Grateful” at 17th street studios in Newport Beach with engineer Lewis Richards. For the rest of the singles, we are recording at Love and Laughter Studios in Anaheim with engineer Orlando Torres. At Love and Laughter, we all record together with the amps isolated in other rooms and then overdub the vocals, percussion, horns, and organ. For a few of the sessions, we recorded two songs in one 8 hour session. These songs are coming out with an authentic and organic feel because we are all grooving together just like we would on a live set.
We have been performing live since 2010 and that is where we are most comfortable. It is awesome to all be in the same room at the same time vibing off of one another for the recording. This is the first time I have done this. Previously, on our High Times album, we recorded each track separately. Then we edit the songs with recording engineer Scott Zschomler at Beehive Studios in Costa Mesa. This entails lining up all of the drum hits and creating an edit from the best vocal takes to make the final cohesive edit. Next, we bring the pro tools files back to Love and Laughter where we Mix the final Master copy. We add compression, reverb, delay, and EQ to each individual track. I really enjoy working in the studio and helping to produce all of the music. It takes a lot of time and effort, but the final product makes it all worthwhile!
What does reggae mean to you? Furthermore, what about it first incised you to become a musician, specifically a reggae musician?
Reggae to me is upbeat. It’s that constant force of positive energy in my life. The moral compass that guides me. The drums in reggae music are the same rhythm as the human heartbeat. It doesn’t matter what your religion, ethnicity, color of your skin or gender is. Reggae music is about bringing people together and using music as a unifying force to unite us all. When the music starts to play everyone feels it. I’m always striving to have a positive outlook on life and within my relationships with my friends and my family. Always trying to uplift those that I come into contact with. I started listening to Ziggy Marley from a young age. My mom had a kids cd that had Ziggy’s song “Give a little Love” on it from his 1986 album Hey World. This song had a huge impact on me. It is super positive about making the world a better place. That is something my parents instilled in me at a young age. We would always clean up the beach whenever we went down to the ocean and pick up at least 3 pieces of trash. My mom would always say, ‘leave the beach cleaner than you found it.’
I started listening to Bob Marley in college and Rebelution and Iration went to my school so I would frequent their concerts around Isla Vista house parties. After my college years, I met Diogba ‘Dig’ Gbye our percussion player and vocalist. He is from Liberia, West Africa and he introduced us to other reggae artists such as Steel Pulse, Barrington Levy, Toots and the Maytals, Gregory Issacs, Midnite, UB40, and Burning Spear to name a few. We also had legendary Jamaican bass player Fully Fullwood record bass on two of our tracks. But I wasn’t just influenced by reggae music. I have studied the songwriting of James Taylor, Neil Young, Jack Johnson, the Beatles, Coldplay and love acoustic folk.
Finally, what do you hope us, the listeners, will take from your music?
I hope the listeners will feel uplifted by our music and the message behind it. I hope they can listen to the music while appreciating all of the abundances they have in their lives and just turn up the speakers and forget their troubles. I hope the music inspires others to follow their dreams, passions and makes them choose kindness and positivity in their everyday lives. I hope it makes them consciously aware of what is going on around them at home and globally around the world. Finally, I hope they dig the vibes enough to come out to a live show and support the band’s efforts to crowdfund our own music. We have no label and no investors backing us. It puts us in a unique position to continue to create positive music and have complete creative control over our projects, but it is also a struggle making a living solely from music. We have performed over 2000 shows since 2010. It has taken years of hard work and sacrifice to pursue our dreams, but we wouldn’t trade the feeling of performing live and making a positive impact on others lives for anything in the world. We have an awesome group of friends and family who have helped support the band thus far and are so grateful for all of the opportunities we have gotten to perform our original music together!
For more information on the band, check out their website here. If you’re interested in reading more content by Corduroy Soul, check out Corduroy’s blog here.
Much love,
