Santa Monica
by Everclear
- 100
- BPM
- G major
- Key
- 9B
- Camelot
- 50
- Danceability
- 16
- Acousticness
Art Alexakis wrote "Santa Monica" about the place where he grew up, a seaside town he described as being like Los Angeles but on the coast. He said he used the palm trees and the town as references because they were what he knew. The song is also about getting away from bad times, he explained, because the end of something is the start of something new, whether a bad job, a bad relationship or a bad way of life.
When Alexakis was a teenager, his girlfriend died by suicide. Soon afterward he attempted the same by jumping off the Santa Monica Pier.
Everclear, the band he formed in Portland, Oregon, in 1992, put the song on its second album, Sparkle and Fade (1995), and it went to US rock radio that September. It was never sold as a commercial single in the United States. Airplay alone took it to No. 29 on the Billboard Hot 100 Airplay chart and to No. 1 on the Album Rock Tracks chart for three weeks in 1996. In Europe it carried the subtitle "Watch the World Die." After the September 11 attacks, Clear Channel placed it on a list of songs considered inappropriate to play.
Santa Monica runs at 100 BPM, the tempo of mid-tempo pop, dancehall and indie. In classical terms it sits in andante territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 2.4 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 600 ms. It is in G major, Camelot 9B, which shares its notes with E minor and mixes cleanly with C major and D major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.