The second single from Toronto one-man psych pop outfit, Nightlife Anonymous. Going to L.A. starts as a dreamy singer-songwriter track and morphs into a tongue in cheek pop rock anthem about moving to L.A. to become a rock star.
When asked about himself and this song Nightlife Anonymous told Unheard Gems:
"My name is Nick Topfer. I've spent most of my musical life focused on being a guitarist, but when my last band broke up around 2014 I started writing and producing songs by myself - this solo project became Nightlife Anonymous. Clearly it's been a long road developing my vocals/songwriting/production chops as it took until 2019 before I actually released anything. I put out a rough demo of a song called "Smoke" last March, and one of my producer/engineer friends, Rich Davey, heard it and offered to help with recording some more songs, as he has a more legit setup at his place. "Going to L.A." is the second song we've recorded together, but it's actually one of the first songs I wrote like 5 years ago. It's a lot more straight up pop than most of the other songs I've written, and I struggled with figuring out an arrangement I liked for it, so I had just been sitting on it until we started working on it together in the past few months. I actually wrote the song sitting at my computer at work believe it or not. It was one of the rare times that words and melody came to me at the same time, and super quickly. I snuck off and recorded it as a voice memo in the bathroom and then put chords to it later when I got home. In terms of lyrical content, it's pretty tongue in cheek. I think of it as being from the perspective of a young naive kid who has never actually been to L.A. and only has this warped perspective on what it might be like based on movies etc."
Conducted by Hannah Schneider