L.A. Fires One Year Later: Music Community Reckons With Loss and Uncertainty

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ne year after wildfires fueled by hurricane-force winds roared through Los Angeles County, killing 31 people and destroying thousands of homes, survivors are still absorbing the impact. Many are members of the music industry, creatives who were drawn to the rugged beauty of the tight-knit communities on the edges of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains.

While last year’s Jan. 7 fires have largely faded from national headlines, the historic disasters remain an inescapable part of daily life for many victims. Rolling Stone spoke with 10 survivors as they continue to navigate different stages of recovery in hard-hit Altadena and the Pacific Palisades. They describe a mix of gratitude for the support they received, weariness over the uneven work of rebuilding, and hope. These are their stories:

Griffin Goldsmith, 35, Dawes Drummer, Altadena

The last thing I want people to do is feel bad for me. There’s no reason to feel bad: My life has been amazing. I had a kid two weeks after the fire, and it just felt like I didn’t know how to reintegrate music in my life. And even though it was only two months until it did and we started doing shows again, it felt like an eternity. So that really was the catharsis, getting back on tour and doing what we know how to do.

I’ve always been very careful to not let the fact that this is a job and the economics of it bleed into the music. It’s always come easy to us. But for me, there’s been a little bit of fight-or-flight mode, of “Let’s go do that, let’s go do this.” I need to get my life right. It’s not like I’m out there playing shows to make money, but I can feel that mindset creeping in a little bit, mainly because my life exploded and my personal finances were destroyed. We’re good relative to other people, and frankly it wasn’t even about “How do I make money?” It was more like, “I need to think about eight months from now and what the long-term game is in terms of getting my family housed.”

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We’re in Eagle Rock now, so not far, and we really like our house, but it’s not the same. I still feel the presence of Altadena. I miss the neighborhood. We don’t have our family right here. We don’t have Wylie Gelber, our original bassist, our oldest friend, he was down the street. He lost his house, too. I’m stoked for everyone that is back in Altadena, and it’s palpable when you go there: It makes me so happy. But I didn’t feel like I had the opportunity, given how quickly my wife gave birth. It wasn’t about “How do I protect my relationship with this community I love so much?” It was “I need to house a family in a way that makes sense.”

We still retain the right to rebuild, but my kid would be in school before there’s anything resembling a neighborhood or a house for me. I’m going to need a few years to uncover some of the trauma I probably need to take a good look at. There’s still a lot of baggage around how I relate to the community. Taylor will tell you, I was the biggest advocate. The reason everyone we knew was there was because I wouldn’t shut up about how incredible the neighborhood was. The only thing to do is to say “This is different, and I’m going to embrace it now as it is.” I’m not going to live in that space of just lamenting the loss forever. 

Altadena is a Black neighborhood, and for a lot of these families, the houses are generational. So for a lot of people, because they’ve owned it straight up, they didn’t have homeowners insurance because it wasn’t necessary to have it [back then], and so they are truly screwed. 

I was begging my lender to carry my interest rate, and then, as collateral, I was offering them these [insurance] checks I’ve received, and they wouldn’t do it. I even spoke to the underwriting team at Fannie Mae, who were pretty much like, “What? We don’t give a shit. What are you saying to us? Who are you?” And my point is I’m just some dude who lost his house and is trying to do everything to get a leg up in an awful situation, and these institutions that leverage all our wealth are just like, “Sorry, we don’t care. It’s business as usual.” There was not one institution in that world of lending, or politically, that I know that were willing to budge on business as usual, and that’s truly fucked up. This nightmare that’s coming for all these people in Altadena is actually starting the rebuilding process. 

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Something really consequential that happened to so many of us, in today’s media cycle, is easily forgotten. People move on, and that’s how I honestly would want it to be. I don’t want people to dwell on us or anybody else’s loss, but on the other hand, that’s easy for me to say. My family’s OK. But a lot of people that endured what we did aren’t. And they still need help. 

Chris Shiflett, 54, Foo Fighters Guitarist, Palisades

My wife and I have lived in the Palisades since 2002. We’ve been in the same spot ever since, watching our three sons go from babies to teenagers. Our home life seemed a long way from rock & roll — structured and quiet — and that was no accident.

On the day of the fire, I had to run up to Santa Barbara. I was going to go surf and then connect with my oldest brother. I drove by Rincon and had a look. I think about that moment a lot, because if the swell had been good, I’d have been in the water and the day would have wound up very different.

I got a call from my brother saying there was a fire, and I started driving back to L.A. Along the way, I got the notice on my phone that we were being evacuated. My oldest son was home from college, and my other sons had come home from school, and I grabbed an overnight bag, our cats, and dog, and planned to go back to Santa Barbara and wait it out. We’d been through it before.

But I kick myself for that moment and not understanding the severity of it in real time. I have a 15-passenger van that I use for my solo tour stuff and instead of grabbing all of our family photos and keepsakes, I just threw a couple of surfboards and wetsuits in the back. And I did the dishes! I left home around 2 o’clock and traffic was already batshit. It was smoky and hazy. I remember my oldest asking me, “Do you think we might lose our house?” I was like, “No.…”

The next morning in Santa Barbara, I looked at the fire map, and it didn’t show it getting into our part of town. I thought we were OK. Then I called my neighbor. He said, “The whole neighborhood is gone, man,” and sent me a video of our street on fire. I saw my house.

We lost everything. It’s forever changed my understanding of, whatever it is, wildfire, flood, hurricane, war — we all live through that imagery a lot, and you look at it, like, “How horrible.” But until you experience it yourself, it’s hard to understand how connected you are to your home. A day and a half after our neighborhood burned, I rode a bike up into the Palisades from Santa Monica. Everything was still smoldering. Totally post-apocalyptic. In the weeks that followed, I dug through the rubble but was only able to pull out a handful of charred ceramics. Nothing survived. It’s still hard to talk about without getting emotional. I feel like I’ve lost control of my emotions much of the time. I’m not sure when that’s going to go away.

Darryl “JMD” Moore, 66, Freestyle Fellowship Drummer-Engineer, Altadena

The wind had already blown my fence over by the time the fire started in Eaton Canyon. I could see the glow in the sky and flashes as transformers blew. The gusts were blowing east, so I thought we were safe. Eventually, the sky was just orange. It looked like a sea of fire over our heads, and we were in the curl of the wave. I remember staring at the transformer outside our house like it was a bomb.

I tried to put some water on my roof, but the stream would go up four feet and turn sideways in the wind. Around 3:30 a.m., the sheriff rolled by on a bullhorn. When I saw the terror on my wife’s face, we got in our cars.

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Darryl Moore’s Home

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My son’s friend got video of our house burning the next morning. The intensity was crazy. I lost the 1965 Rogers Holiday drum kit I used to record “Inner City Boundaries” with Freestyle Fellowship, and all of the tapes I made with those kids. Our whole archives burned to dust. I had reels and reels of DATs covering the beginning of the 1990s hip-hop scene at the Good Life Cafe in Crenshaw and Project Blowed in Leimert Park. I lost the coffee table that saved my mom’s life when it stopped a bullet that randomly blasted through my grandmother’s front door. My wife is a costumer and lost her archive.

We faced some racism trying to find a place to rent. Not all the time, but enough. We found an apartment in Mid-City and lived like college students for months. Now, we’re renting in Altadena.

Our insurance is only paying $600,000 to rebuild our house. There’s no way we can replace what we had for that. Every builder says we need $1.2 million minimum. We have lawyers representing us against Southern California Edison, but that could take years. We jumped through all of the hoops for a $500,000 SBA loan, thinking we could pay it off early with a settlement, but the fine print said we’d still be on the hook for an extra $244,000 in interest. It’s predatory.

I can’t explain the emotional stress from everything. It’s soul-sucking. We moved here in 1996, and it became my home. We raised four kids here. There was a wealth of jazz cats living nearby. I used to have coffee with Bennie Maupin, who played with Miles Davis. I would sit in on Bobby Bradford’s classes at Pasadena City College. They lost their homes, too.

Fellow musicians Terrace Martin and Kamasi Washington organized a benefit that helped me buy a new computer, the literal heart of my studio. I’ve only written one piece of music since the fire. It’s not in me right now. The spark of creativity is dull.

What I miss the most about my old house is practicing drums, looking out the window, and seeing my wife come through the door dancing. It was always the best feeling. That’s the reason to rebuild, to get that back. We worked hard all our lives. I was a traveling aircraft mechanic. My wife works in TV. A short day for her is 14 hours. We want the house we had, the house we deserve. All these rich corporations are buying up homes to rent them. We have to protect this kooky, quirky town of Altadena that’s full of artists and people with chickens and horses. We’re never going to get everything back, but we want our house, debt-free, for our descendants. Our property is our legacy. It’s for our children. I’ll get a sign that says “Mooreland.”

Zachary Cole Smith, 41, DIIV Frontman, Altadena

We love Altadena. We moved there in 2022, and it’s a tight-knit little zone. I don’t think about the fires that much now; my wife was seven-months pregnant, and we had a two-year-old. I got a call from a friend, and he was like, “Hey, there’s a fire in Eaton Canyon.” It was our son’s bedtime, so we decided to get a hotel somewhere. It was a tough night; we put our son to bed, and then I started getting really worried that the hotel room that I booked was closer to the fire than our house was. I kept checking the evacuation zones, and early the next morning, one of our neighbors sent us a video near the house, and she said, “It looks like it’s snowing — the sky is orange.” At that point, it was too late. Everything we owned was gone.

There’s no one thing that everybody’s experiencing. It’s unleashed this maze of people trying to piece their lives back together. There’s a lot of grief. It’s more than the houses — these are whole entire ecosystems and livelihoods and communities. It’s all been dismantled, and people have to piece it back together the best they can.

We bounced around for a while. We went and stayed with my wife’s mom, then we found a place that was nice — a small, temporary thing. Our son was born while we were living there. We’re going to be rebuilding. We have a lot of love for Altadena, and I’ve never really felt rooted in a place before. You know, New York feels so much bigger than you. We plan to die in Altadena. 

Having two kids puts your life into perspective, so I feel like I am taking music more seriously after the fires than I ever have. I really see this as my job and my livelihood. I think a lot of musicians, when they get a little bit older, start to think about “What am I doing?” And the thing that stuck for me was: Music was fun at a certain point, and when it’s your job, you can start to forget that. And so that’s a really big reminder that I’ve been trying to enforce on myself and the band. Balancing that with this immediacy of taking it really seriously, too. 

I think about hope a lot. We made a record before the fire that I think dealt a lot with the idea of hope in the face of the world. Hope is this very personal thing, and you can find it anywhere. But for me, it’s really my family. Even if you’re completely black-pilled, which maybe I am, having kids in the face of that … there is hope and optimism there. Everything we do, it’s for the family. The kids.

Christophe Beck, 56, Film-Score Composer, Palisades

I moved to the Palisades eight years before the fire. It was a bubble of peace inside greater L.A., with a real small-town feeling. Once my now-wife moved in, we started to grow roots.

On Jan. 7, I got a notification from a neighbor around 10:40 a.m. I walked outside and saw a concerning plume of smoke over the hill. Twenty minutes later, smoke filled a third of the sky. It was shocking how fast it grew. We started gathering essentials. It was confusing. On one hand, we were being cautious and expected to be home in two days. On the other hand, there was a looming feeling of catastrophe. That led to odd decisions in retrospect. I spent eight minutes carefully portioning out a week’s worth of medication when I could have taken it all in seconds. I had instruments collected over 30 years and took just one microphone. We packed one suitcase, loaded our dogs in the car, and left for our house in the desert.

We were up all night watching the news. Around 6 a.m., we watched an ABC reporter strolling through our neighborhood. It was house after house flattened. Then the camera swung to our street corner. We freaked out, trying to catch a glimpse of our house. Our neighbor’s house was in the way, but immediately behind it, we could see flames. We were watching our home burn live on the news.

As soon as the neighborhood opened to residents, we were back. I spent a lot of time on the site just crying. We didn’t find anything of value, but sitting and grieving there felt important. The frame of my piano was visible, and I sat in the middle to process the loss. We lost the guest book from our wedding. We both had bins and bins of old family photos. Every musical instrument we owned was gone. I lost a modular synth with hundreds of individual components that had been evolving for years. Losing that in one night was tough. Good luck trying to explain the value of that to an insurance company.

Even as you’re trying to process the loss, the most giant pain-in-the-ass administrative project lands in your lap. We looked for a rental, but it was out of control. Every listing had hundreds of applicants. We’re very fortunate that we were able to put together a plan to purchase something. We found something we love in Silver Lake and have been making it our home. The whole experience has been a practice in surrender, every different flavor of surrender.

We’re not rebuilding yet. It’s unclear what our neighborhood will look and feel like going forward. If it’s anything like it was before, rebuilding is definitely something we’d consider. But if a lot of developers come in, it could become very different.

There’s also PTSD from the actual fire. I was around a campfire in the desert a couple of months later. From a logical perspective, it was a normal campfire, but to me, it just felt huge. It brought up a lot of fear that I hadn’t quite processed. Recovery requires patience, and we’re working on it. That house in the Palisades truly felt like home. My wife and I travel often for work, and returning there always felt safe and welcoming. I love our new home, but I’m still searching for that feeling.

We landed on our feet, but we’re still waking up and remembering something else we lost. We’re in a much better place, emotionally, but I don’t think the sadness will ever go away completely. The waves are less frequent, but a part of my heart was lost that day.

Tony “Fat Tony” Obi, 37, Rapper, Altadena

I thought my Altadena house would be my forever home. I could see the mountains from my living room, parrots in the trees, and stars at night. My friend Stephanie Ward lived across the street. We worked together on Thrift Haul With Fat Tony, our 2018 series for Super Deluxe. My friend Kathleen Hanna and her husband, Adam, organized a nearby softball hang. Rancho Bar was the perfect dive. Everything I needed was within two miles.

I’d lived there for a year and was just settling in when the fire happened. It was the first house that felt fully mine, with my taste and energy. The holidays were great. My girlfriend and I spent many nights by the fireplace and cooked amazing meals. I was looking forward to 2025.

I’ve lived in Los Angeles most of my adult life and seen wildfires, but usually near Malibu. On Jan. 7, the news said the power might be shut off, so I went to stay with my girlfriend. I didn’t think I was about to lose everything. I only grabbed my laptop. I saw distant flames but wasn’t in a mandatory-evacuation zone. I live west of Lake Avenue, and we never got a warning.

Fifteen minutes later, the sky was blood red. Fire trucks were everywhere. On the freeway, I could see the whole canyon on fire. It looked like an action movie. I was scared for everyone in its path. We watched the news all night, and the fire maps still showed flames mostly east of Lake. The next day, we learned my entire street had burned down.

I lost everything: memorabilia, analog music, first-edition books, vintage magazines, journals, photos, and clothes I’d collected since my teens. I lost VHS tapes of my first and third birthdays, which devastated me.

I was renting, and for a while, I didn’t want to live there again. It felt like my Altadena dream was dead. But on Dec. 3, my girlfriend and I went to the 105th anniversary of Altadena’s Christmas Tree Lane, a street of giant trees that somehow didn’t burn. It reminded me how random the fire was.

I now live in Lincoln Heights in an 1890 Victorian, which I love. When I was back in Altadena on Dec. 3, I ran into old neighbors excited about rebuilding. It was sweet hearing them talk about the homes they loved. I’m feeling more positive about Altadena again.

My therapist says I was grieving, partly because of a past fire. When I was 11, a fire started in our attic, and my bedroom was destroyed. I could have been hurt, but I’d fallen asleep in my grandmother’s room. I’m scared of fires now, but there are other natural disasters, too.

Going back to Altadena is still TBD. I’m optimistic, but it’s not in my current plans. Maybe it can be home again someday. Even though I lived there only a year, that house set the blueprint for what I want my home to be moving forward.

Diana Baron, Music Publicist, Palisades

I moved to the Palisades 32 years ago, when my son was little, so he could attend the great public schools. I’d evacuated before, but never like this, never with flames visible from my neighbor’s driveway. It was about 1:30 in the afternoon when I started throwing things in my car to leave. I remember staring at a suitcase, debating what to take. “I’ll get it tomorrow,” I thought. It didn’t register there might not be a tomorrow for my house.

I grabbed my dog, a Rolling Stone cover of me that the ad department made when I was ad director at Warner Bros. in the 1970s, and a signed Keith Haring lithograph for A Very Special Christmas.

I drove to my brother’s house near Century City. I had just installed a new fire-alarm system, and the alerts kept pinging: “Smoke. Smoke. Smoke.” I called the company to confirm it was only smoke. In reality, that was probably when everything was burning.

The next morning, a neighbor biked up the hill and sent video. Only my chimney was still standing. The impossible had happened. Everything was gone: a Beatles program book signed to me when I was a teenager, a drawing Leonard Cohen made for me, a video of Al Green at my son’s christening in the backyard, playing a guitar, singing, and lifting him in the air.

I was devastated. In my work, we’re always managing what we say. This time, I couldn’t manage anything. When I called my son, I broke down crying. He didn’t want me to see the ruins alone. The next day, we parked in Santa Monica and walked two miles because police were turning people back. At Sunset Boulevard and Drummond Street, almost nothing was recognizable. Landmarks were gone. Flames were still burning in my neighbor’s yard. I tried to dig through the debris, but I couldn’t even identify the rooms. Everything was blackened except a small rubber duck and a statue of our Labrador, Romeo, that my son made when he was six.

People stepped in immediately. Laura Swanson, who leads marketing and press at Warner, found me the Mar Vista house where I’m staying. Jeff Gold, formerly head of creative services at Warner, helped me find an adjuster so I wouldn’t have to negotiate with the insurance company alone. John Vlautin from A&M gave me an Eames chair, my first piece of furniture.

My neighbors across the street aren’t returning. They’ve moved to Laguna. But I couldn’t walk away. Every day, I remember something else that’s gone, my dad’s gold watch that he gave to my son on the day he died, my grandmother’s antique bronze lamps from China, all my signed first editions. They’re irreplaceable. Still, I try to focus on what’s ahead.

About two months ago, when the second story began rising, I invited friends to see the construction. I could finally picture where everything would go. Now, when I visit, I don’t want to leave. I go alone on weekends and sit in the empty rooms. We planted 16 ficus trees and will add a sycamore, grounding the space again. I think I’ll be back living at home by the Fourth of July.

A couple of weeks after the fire, my son asked if I would get a tattoo with him. I got a migrating mallard. It’s from an old Japanese woodcut. It’s my nature to just keep going, no matter what. Even though I still feel sad sometimes, I keep going. I am the migrating mallard. I can’t give up.

Stephanie Weiss, 41, Music Publicist, Palisades

We lived with our two young daughters, way up Palisades Drive in the Highlands area where it was more affordable. We were very close to where the original Lachman Fire started on Jan. 1. At the time, I thought that was the scariest thing ever. A week later, it reignited and became the Palisades Fire. I was out running errands that morning. As I drove back, I saw the smoke. They wouldn’t let me up my street, and they wouldn’t let anyone leave. My husband was home with our 19-month-old daughter, Florence. They were trapped, and I was freaking out, panicking.

I picked up our older daughter from preschool and went to my mom’s house to watch the news. My husband and I were talking by phone, but it was so chaotic we didn’t know what to do. They had to wait to be escorted by firefighters through the flames on both sides of Palisades Drive. We finally reunited at a hotel that night. My husband was so shaken — he didn’t want to talk about how terrifying the drive had been. He only said Florence was singing as she held his hand.

The next day, we learned our 36-unit complex had burned. We lost everything — old photos, record collections, our kids’ first artwork, three deep freezers full of breast milk. I had worked so hard to pump so I could get Florence to two years. My husband, a musician known as 505 Palisades, lost all of his vintage synthesizers, drum machines, and recording gear. It was all gone. But he had grabbed a bag off my desk, and inside was an old ring from my grandmother. The girls must have randomly tucked it in there while playing in my closet. It feels incredibly special now.

We saved for a decade to buy that townhouse. Unfortunately, our insurance was bad because the area was high-risk. Everything was underinsured. I almost wish we could just walk away, but we still have HOA dues, property taxes, and a mortgage. Those don’t go away, and now we’re also paying rent and eventually rebuilding costs. It’s all so expensive and constant. It’s a lot of pressure.

It feels like a grieving process, shocking and hard to handle, but you have to be there for the kids. Staying busy helps. Focusing on my work as an independent music publicist and owner of my company, Sweiss PR, has made me feel better. I’m thankful to have supportive long-time clients and colleagues. I never stopped working. I also never went back to the site. I still haven’t been. They invited us to go collecting, but I didn’t want to see everything in ash. I think about my old life, and I don’t want to see it destroyed.

I’m not sure if we’ll ever move back. Rebuilding makes sense, so that’s the plan. What else can you do? It was a really nice place, but I know it will look different. They haven’t even started reconstruction. Maybe once they do, I’ll go back. I don’t know how it will feel. I’ve never been through anything like this.

There’s still financial stress, but we’re doing better. Our daughter is happy in her new school. MusiCares gave out Walmart gift cards for the holidays, which was very kind. We’ve built a replacement life. We’re OK. We’re still here. I just have to be grateful everyone survived and is healthy. It sounds so cliché, but it’s true.

Larry LaLonde, 57, Primus Guitarist, Palisades

It’s funny because now that it’s been a year, you start to look back and it feels like it’s been five years at the same time in different ways.

Luckily, the kids were home because it was Christmas vacation. I told everybody, “There’s a fire. Gather up whatever you want to take with you.” And it started getting worse. I started going through, “OK, what’s the important stuff?” Everyone in the street was looking up at the hill going, “Oh wow.” I’m like, “We’re getting ready to get out of here.” They’re like, “You’re leaving?” I’m like, “Yeah.”

A couple of days after the fire arrived, they were letting people go back up there. The cops drove me up, and it was looking worse and worse. The officer that drove me up, it was his first trip up, and by the time we got to the top of the hill, he was like, “Holy shit.” And the first thing we came across on our way to the house was a couple of other cops arresting looters.

When we turned onto our street, it looked like a bomb had gone off. It was just chimneys and smoke and smoldering. At our house, nothing was left. There was a chimney, and, surprisingly, I saw a lot of the backs of television sets that were still floating around. I was looking at the pile like, “I wonder if there’s anything left under this rubble?” because there’s a lot of guitars in my studio.

When we evacuated, the first thing I grabbed was this double-neck Gibson that Alex Lifeson from Rush had given me. It’s like, “What’s the most important one?” I think right now there are 58 guitars that are gone. There’s one that I had since I was in high school that I used on all of the Primus records that didn’t make it out, and there’s a bunch of ones that Gibson had built for me custom that didn’t make it.

The dumbest thing I did — the thing that will haunt me forever — is I had a giant hard drive on the desk that was just for this situation. I walked by it probably 20 times and forgot to grab it. It’s like losing a life’s work of stuff that you were smart enough to put on the hard drive, but not smart enough to take in an emergency.

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Larry LeLonde

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First, we went to a hotel, and after that, my manager called and said, “Come to my house in Santa Monica.” While we were there, Matt Stone, my friend from South Park called, and he’s like, “Hey, man, I’m out of town for a couple weeks. You can stay at our house.” That was a lifesaver. And Les [Claypool] was awesome. He was like, “What can I help you with?” And just getting into the room with him, later, that meant the world, too. It was like, “OK, I’m back to normalcy,” because that’s definitely my extended family. He hooked me up with one of his super awesome basses, so that softened the blow using a few of the instruments.

Our kids have been pretty stoic throughout the whole thing. I’m sure that they’ve been putting on a brave face. My wife’s had a hard time because she lost so many family things that were from her grandmother. It’s been really hard losing all of the sentimental things like that and just losing your home in general. Everyone’s handled it very well, but I know it’s been tough.

The government response feels nonexistent for the most part. There’s an amazing councilwoman here, Traci Park, who seems to really care about it, but other than that, it feels a little bit abandoned. A lot of outsiders say “Oh, California sucks, and it’s badly run.” And you’re like, “Come on, man, here’s your chance to prove these people wrong.”

We’re in a rental in Venice [California] now. We’re actually getting ready to move to another one. We’ll eventually move back to the Palisades. The finances dictate that. We have to rebuild our house because we can’t, for lack of a better way of saying it, afford to sell the dirt lot. It would probably cost me more than I actually have. But we love the Palisades. It’s a great place. I don’t know what it’s going to turn into, but our thought now is we have to rent until we can rebuild this thing.

Taylor Goldsmith, 40, Dawes Singer-Guitarist, Altadena

I lost my studio and my garage, but I didn’t lose my house. I also have three kids — my youngest was three months old at the time of the fire — so I was blinded by fatherhood to really let too much of what happened take me down. Some of my friends, they stopped sleeping. I couldn’t relate to that because I was in survival-kid mode. 

After eight months, we’re back in Altadena. We moved back in late August/early September after all of the remediation was done. It’s wild being back in our house because it looks the same, but every rug, chair, article of clothing was replaced. All the walls were torn up because all the insulation and ducting had to be replaced. We anticipated some serious emotional processing upon returning when we would drive through the neighborhood and see what beloved structures were gone, or know that Griffin’s house up the street wasn’t there. We expected that to knock us on our ass regularly, and it did, but it also very quickly became only nice to be back. 

A lot of that is the goodwill around the community. I went on a run, and there were strangers in their cars leaning out with their fists in the air just saying hi. There’s a lot more goodwill and determination. Some construction is being started, and everyone’s having those conversations about how much of this is going to be developers or the banks that originally owned the property, and it’s going to be a mixed bag. That’s how neighborhoods work. There’s going to be some sharks, and there’s going to be some really benevolent people that are helping the right people get in there. But it feels good to be home. 

The fire has really opened my eyes in a beautiful way to how we are much more members of Los Angeles than I thought. L.A. is not a town that seems to celebrate its hometown heroes in the same way a smaller city might. Every time we’ve played hometown shows it never felt like there was ownership being declared, and I always wished for that. But now, whether it’s Kimmel or the Grammys or all of the little fundraisers, it just feels like, “Whoa, we are an L.A. band and always have been.”

As a writer, there’s been one song I wrote about [the fire], but trying to tell the story feels useless. For me, it became more a song about the subtle ways I feel permanently changed, but not in a dark way. A lot of people would be like, “I can’t wait to hear the next batch of songs,” after the fire, but I don’t think there can be many songs about this. Rather than specific tunes, it’s imbued other ideas and songs and given a layer to what the rest can be about.

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The last record we put out, Oh Brother, there are songs like “Mister Los Angeles” and “House Parties”; there’s a little more levity. So far, the batch that I’ve written, there hasn’t been a lot of that. It’s more about how it’s affected my overall perspective, and you can sense the fire in that, again not in a way where we’re not all of a sudden some depressive metal band. I wrote a song about my relationship with our dad, and I feel the fire in that song, even though it’s definitely not about it. 

Overall, I’ve realized I’m not comfortable in this position of being a victim of something. When we were doing these fundraisers and people would give me this wide-eyed look of “I’m so sorry,” I’d be like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I don’t wanna do that. I just want to get back to joking and talking about songs.”