I, much like Bay Area native Cass McCombs, have a complicated relationship with California. In my five years living there, I sometimes felt fully immersed—soaking in its scenery, its layered culture, its sense of possibility. But whether it was East Coast stubbornness or the way the perfect view seemed to darken the internal fog, I never felt entirely settled. It wasn’t until I moved back to Brooklyn that I found myself romanticizing what I’d left behind, replaying memories in warmer tones, imagining a California that exists more in my head than in reality.
McCombs has been circling similar terrain for over two decades. A reluctant but persistent presence in the broader “indie rock” landscape, he’s been releasing music steadily since his 2002 EP Not the Way. Last year’s archival compilation, Seed Cake on Leap Year, put him face-to-face with his younger self and the Bay Area connections that shaped his early work. On Interior Live Oak, his 11th solo full-length, McCombs revisits those roots through an elevated, lived-in lens, reuniting with longtime collaborators Jason Quever (Papercuts) and Chris Cohen, both of whom were a crucial part of his earliest recordings.
For all intents and purposes, Interior Live Oak is a Northern California record—the title alone refers to an evergreen tree that thrives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains—but much of it was written in New York. On a recent episode of the Never Ending Stories podcast, McCombs explained that, to him, “California lives in an imaginary location. It’s the California and the Bay Area that live in my imagination.” He’s spoken about growing up with a certain distaste for the place, and, like me, he seems to prefer the ideal, non-existent Californian dreamscape we’ve built in our heads.
That imagined California frees him from fact or fidelity. On Interior Live Oak, his detachment reads as a calm remove—a willingness to look back at home, childhood, and the past fully acknowledging the imagination that shapes those memories. That distance also opens up the sonic space, untethering the record from strict genre confines by pushing it towards concurrent narratives: personal reflections, underworld vignettes, and tales of mythical creatures. They’re all rooted in the same place, but each unfolds in its own direction, the way McCombs’ own paths have peeled apart over time.
These reflections become jumping-off points for the songs to take shape. Songwriting is at the core of McCombs’ creative process, even more than the act of recording itself. He works with a whimsical distance that’s as matter-of-fact as it is mythical, rejecting rigid structure and leaving interpretation up to the listener. The record drives easily from Khruangbin-infused grooves (“Priestess”) into gentle mandolin odes (“Missionary Bell”), cinematic brooding (“Who Removed The Cellar Door?”), and strippled-back simplicity (“I’m Not Ashamed”). Sometimes the lyrics are bluntly cutthroat (“Authority sucks / You suck, I suck”), other times, they’re steeped in platitude (“All is temporary / The wheel keeps on turning” could be a line from “The Circle Game”). McCombs leans into the inherent looseness of memory, wrapping tales in tight metaphors or pushing sounds to such extremes that it becomes impossible to tell where intention ends and happenstance begins, much like his memories, imagined into permanence.
Standout “Asphodel” depicts a portal beneath San Francisco’s TransAmerica Pyramid that leads to the city’s dark underworld. Somehow, a flower grows among the rubble. For its somewhat sci-fi premise, it’s nostalgic in sound (part Foo Fighters, part Smashing Pumpkins), anchored by a snappy uptempo beat and some of the fuzziest guitar work on the album, which sharpen to a point by the track’s end. It’s the kind of song that feels made for a first-generation iPod. In the second verse lies a contender for the project’s thesis statement: “Don’t confine or define me / I’m not your experiment / And I mean everything I say / Or something not unlike it.” McCombs can be anywhere, anyone, talking about anything. Is the Tenderloin-turned-hell story a commentary on the tech-and-finance-bro-ification of San Francisco, or is it just a silly detour? That’s for you to care about.
Regardless of its thematic remove, Interior Live Oak stays inherently emotive, rooted in lived experience. “Home At Last” is a self-deprecating acoustic track that feels like it exists in an alternate universe, where McCombs didn’t find community when he left for New York and had to come back to tell his naysayers they were right. It carries the weight of slumping home, bags dragging, swallowed by a Pacific Northwest fog that leaves you wandering in a cloudy abyss. The seven-minute epic “Lola Montez Danced The Spider Dance” pivots outward, spinning a Dylan-esque, six-verse portrait of 19th-century dancer Lola Montez (who was in California during the Gold Rush) hypnotizing her audience. Whether the stories are personal or fictitious, McCombs’ wit and sarcasm remain central. “I Never Dream About Trains” makes that plain, every “never” line delivered with a wink. “Juvenile” goes even further, adopting the voice of someone delivering bad news with a smile, setting a running list of things that “suck” to a deceptively light, poppy beat. Almost as if to say, “If you don’t laugh, you cry.”
McCombs’ gaze turns eastward on “A Girl Named Dogie,” a downtempo track following the titular girl through her first days in Manhattan, ending with a wailing glam-metal guitar solo. (For one last reminder that McCombs evades genre, he threads that Tony Iommi-inspired guitar with bursts of yodeling.) “Van Wyck Expressway” lands among those McCombs songs I can’t hear without thinking of Elliott Smith: the thin electric tones mixed with the cello, the warped snare taps, the heart-tugging melody feel straight out of Figure 8; lyrics like “I’ve seen enough for one day” or “I have no memory of where I’m from or who I used to be” hit with blunt force.
At just over 70 minutes long, Interior Live Oak is short by McCombs’ standards, even if the album meanders and dawdles. But that looseness suits an artist so instinctual and visceral: The title track wakes you back up after some inoffensive, lullaby filler, with its thick biker-rock riffs and double-time drums boiling over with every verse (like if Stevie Ray Vaughn covered “One Way Out” on a tube amp: blown to smithereens, near-implosion, thrashing until the final notes). Beneath the scorched surface of “Interior Live Oak,” fantastical lyrics unfurl: a wizard frees a sprite named Uriel from a tree, and the tree begins to grow inside the narrator. The “interior,” in this sense, feels like a winding metaphor for some sort of mind-body-soul connection—how your home always lives within you, even if you try to reject it. Stories tied to a place become part of your own, creeping in until you can’t fully separate one from the other. It’s a home whose roots live in you, present but subdued, growing quietly in the background, waiting for you to decide what it means. And like Cass McCombs’ California (a place rebuilt from memory, shaped by re/invention) it doesn’t need to exist exactly as it was to feel real.
