Video: Dean Wareham – “The Past Is Our Plaything”

Directed by Alexandra Cabral. From I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A., due October 15 on Double Feature.

This upcoming album contains the first new songs Wareham has written in almost seven years. Why so long? Wareham jokes, “Maybe it’s just too sunny in L.A.”

Tonight I am playing my 335 while gazing at your photograph
We’re living inside a beautiful dream
A winter where memory sleeps.

Wareham says, “‘The Past Is Our Plaything’ was recorded at a studio on Stinson Beach, just north of San Francisco, in November 2020. The song sorta grew out of observations by Julian Barnes in my favorite book last year — The Man In the Red Coat — about a collection of dandies, drug addicts, artists and writers in belle epoque France and England.”