Dean Wareham has shared a new single, the kaleidoscopic baroque-pop stunner, “As Much As It Was Worth It.” The track is off his upcoming album, I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A which is out next Friday, October 15. The video for the song was directed by German artist Judith Berndsen and edited by Britta Phillips. Dean shares “The song is about youth and the loss of someone you loved. I wrote it after reading an essay by Zadie Smith, about joy and suffering, but one line stuck with me, it was something Julian Barnes said to her about the death of his wife: ‘it hurts, just as much as it was worth.’”

Since the release of his last solo album, 2014’s Dean Wareham, Dean scored a film — Noah Baumbach’s Mistress America —  with his wife, Britta Phillips, released an album and toured with his recently reunited group Luna. With Phillips he has also been doing regular livestreams from their home in Los Angeles (a collection largely culled from those sets, Quarantine Tapes, was released in 2020). Yet I Have Nothing to Say to the Mayor of L.A.marks the first new songs Wareham has written in almost seven years. Considering a possible reason for the delay in original material, Wareham jokes “maybe it’s just too sunny in L.A.” 

Photo Courtesy: Luz Gallardo