Northern California singer/songwriter Sasha Papadin aka Loverman has released the video for his song "Coming Up Roses" today via Northern Transmissions. The track was produced by Gus Seyffert (Beck, The Black Keys, Michael Kiwanuka) and features Joey Waronker (R.E.M., Atoms for Peace) on drums.
Watch the video!
"While writing Coming up Roses, I was thinking about people like Leonard Cohen, Johnny Cash, and my own Russian poet father," Sasha Papadin tells Northern Transmissions. "I realized all poets are romantics and all romantics are gamblers. There is so much risk in the creative field and in the way it interacts with your personal life. There are no sure bets if you're reaching for the stars, in art or in love. The song is about not playing it safe and instead chasing those magic moments when the universe tilts your way and everything goes in your favor. I find those moments beautiful and melancholic at the same time because of the hopeful desperation. When it came time to make the music video, I found myself in Las Vegas at the roulette table with my brother the director and my cousin the key grip. Suddenly, it felt like we were living the song and it only seemed right to throw the rest of the video budget onto the table. Then we went out into the outskirts of town and captured the fleeting atmosphere of having won."
Sasha Papadin was born into a life of cinematic romance. His father, the renowned Russian poet and dissident Valentin Papadin, defected from Soviet Russian at the height of the Cold War and escaped to the UK with Sasha's mother, a young English woman who had met him while traveling. Swept from country to country as his parents followed jobs across Europe, the family eventually settled in California. His parents raised seven more children while Sasha grew to become a songwriter and singer for a number of bands, most notably 1955, who played alongside The Raveonettes and Blonde Redhead and were stalwarts of the Northern California rock and roll scene.
After his father's sudden death in 2016, Sasha found himself unable to perform and retreated to the recording studio in the back of his furniture workshop, at a loss for how to continue making music. He found solace in duende-drenched albums by Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, and Damon Albarn and eventually traded his guitar for a piano and began to write music that explored themes of mortality and love. He set about soundtracking the melancholic lyrics of love and loss with toe-tapping musical backdrops, weaving elements of Americana and rockabilly into the mix.
The album title Wings of Desire pays homage to Wim Wenders' 1987 film about an angel who gives up his wings in order to experience life and love as a human but must accept mortality as part of the bargain. Loverman, like the character in the film, embraces life, love, and death in his arms, drinking it all in. The world may be going to hell, everybody eventually dies, but damn it life is beautiful!
The debut album Wings of Desire is best enjoyed with a cocktail.
