Poolside Kicks off the ‘Blame it All On Love’ Tour at Santa Barbara’s Beloved SOhO Music Club

Steeping a mugful of green tea and surrounded by an almost excessive amount of house plants in his cozy Topanga Canyon home, Poolside’s Jeffrey Paradise is every bit as chill as you’d expect him to be. His energy is perfectly aligned with the light, breezy, “day-time disco” beats featured on all four of Poolside’s albums. As he gears up to kick off the Blame it All On Love Tour, Paradise is excited to finally experience Santa Barbara on the weekend (he’ll perform at SOhO on Friday, January 19), enjoy all the good food here, and travel by bus on what he is describing as his “first big boy band tour.”

From his 2011 “Harvest Moon” remix that originally earned him traction, it has taken Paradise over a decade to stubbornly accept his role as a frontman. “I’d never really thought the music was going to become more personal,” Paradise said. “The music business is so fickle. I just didn’t expect this to be a career. I always expected it to be like, oh, ‘I did that during that time of my life.’” 

After realizing that this music thing was more than temporary in his fourth studio album Blame it All On Love, Paradise finally leans into being a performer and singer and veers away from his original idea of Poolside as his “DJ project” making background tracks for dinner and pool parties. Following his year off spent exploring other passions and reading self-help books, Paradise found himself once again drawn to create music, this time ready to get more personal and return to his roots on guitar and vocals.

Being such a collaborative effort, it only makes sense that Paradise will be touring the Blame it on Love album with a six-piece supporting ensemble. He loves working with other artists partly for the camaraderie, but also to bring unique vocals, lyrics, and sonic qualities to the tracks. The record features artists like MUNYA, Ben Browning, Panama, Vansire, and more, who will all be joining him intermittently throughout the tour.

The process of working with each artist is different and depends on their style and location. Because the process can be so intimate, Paradise chooses to work with friends or ends up becoming friends with his collaborators by the time they are done working together. With so much music making being done virtually nowadays, some Poolside collabs have been sparked on social media and produced across oceans. 

“I think I’ve met everyone [of the featured artists] now in person but some of the tracks will be finished and we will have never even met.” Paradise said. In the case with Vansire, it wasn’t until they spent five days working on a music video “that was pretty involved,” that the two became good friends and have now hung out “in several cities several different times.”

“I just hit her up on Instagram because I was a fan.” Paradise said about MUNYA, “She was like, ‘Cool. Let’s do it.’” The two ended up writing the lyrics for “Lonely Night” over text which was a first for Paradise. He’s excited to have MUNYA joining him for his Brooklyn show. 

Despite having a narrative theme for this album and tapping into his personal life for inspiration, Paradise finds that it still meets “all the criteria of early Poolside,” which he described as “loungy” and “functional,” placing less emphasis on lyrics and the traditional composition of “verse, chorus, bridge, chorus.” 

The title Blame it All On Love is up for interpretation but Paradise sees it as more of a celebration of the things we blame on love rather than in a cynical sense. “Even the shit you don’t like to do like going to school or work or having a bad job, you’re usually doing that to support your family or to buy a car you want,” Paradise explained.

Shortly after moving into his dream home, driving back from a night out, Paradise and his girlfriend spent hours helping two injured motorcyclists who were victims of a hit and run accident and a witness who was allegedly being held hostage by the perpetrator in an abandoned house nearby. After further police investigation and midway through making Blame it All On Love, it turned out that the supposed witness was in fact the perpetrator herself. 

This sense of betrayal and fear sent Paradise into a paranoiac obsession with stalking the abandoned home to protect the things he loved: his relationship and his new home. Not only was this event a manifestation of what he was writing about, according to a statement about the album, the “irking sense of unease made its way into Blame it All On Love’s otherwise sunny sound in the form of sonic distortion.”

Accompanying five of the 11 tracks are music videos that illustrate the mixed emotions Paradise expresses in his lyrics and instrumentals. In the same vein of getting more personal with songwriting, this is the first time that Paradise starred in the videos and even filmed in his own home and car. The familiar yet strange dinner party spread depicted in the “Float Away” music video captures the same surreal feeling that the bright guitar and distorted keyboard do in the song. 

Coming from his DJing background, Paradise and his band has been rehearsing and experimenting to bring the best versions of both his past, more highly produced projects and the instrument-forward songs on Blame it All On Love to the stage. Whereas when Paradise first started playing music in his high school and college bands, they would rehearse together live and maybe record a song a year later, now the tracks will be completely recorded before he even approaches a live version. “In a weird way we are like a cover band of ourselves,” Paradise said.

Paradise is interrupted by Soren, his adorable rescue (what he assumes to be) shih tzu as he is envisioning tour life. In disbelief that his childhood dream of taking a tour bus around North America is coming to fruition, it finally hits him that he has successfully turned his DJing gig into a serious career in music. 

To purchase tickets and find more information about Poolside’s opening show at SOhO Music Club on January 19, visit poolsidemusic.com/tour. In the meantime, look out for more remixes set to drop before the start of and throughout the tour.