Video: Monnone Alone – “Stay Foggy”

Directed by Lehmann B. Smith. From Stay Foggy, out now on Lost and Lonesome.

Mark Monnone recorded Stay Foggy all by himself on his cassette 8-track during lockdown in 2020. And now the groovy title track has video featuring our bearded hero riding around Melbourne on a cloud. I like the fact that Monnone looks like a Pacific Ocean Blue-era Dennis Wilson these days.

Monnone told Trouble Juice the song’s “skeletal features date back to the mid-00s and may well have ended up somewhere on the next Lucksmiths album had we not broken ourselves up in 2009. As you hear it now, this song was built up around the repetitive bassline that I had originally put down as a demo to test different ideas on. The lyrics are a murky meditation on a summer spent in the San Francisco fog twenty-odd years ago and, in my reverie, imagining my dear friends there all these years later as a bunch of wharf-dwelling ’embarcaderos’ sipping cheap chianti and yelling profanities at the seaside hotdog vendor. The chord structures and melodies all fell together so well on top of the bassline that I didn’t need to come up with any bass variations between verse, chorus, etc, which was good news for me as I’m extremely lazy.”