LA fires: Musicians feel grief, catharsis, and optimism about their art

Written by Amy Ta, produced by Zeke Reed

"Fat Tony" Obi's home in Altadena. Photo credit: Tony Obi.

As the Palisades and Eaton Fires get under control, one community remains particularly affected: music industry folks. Malibu resident Jeffrey Paradise (aka Poolside) and Altadena rapper Tony Obi (aka Fat Tony) both lost everything. 

“It's a minute-by-minute experience of how I'm feeling, perhaps hour by hour at times. Yeah, it’s the whole range of emotional experience, from devastated to optimistic,” Paradise tells KCRW. “There's been so much outpouring from friends and fans and people I don't even know … that it can definitely keep you going, and make you feel a positive sense of responsibility to get back on your feet. But yeah, it comes in waves … where you're like, ‘I think I'm fine,’ and then you're like, ‘Oh man, that thing's gone, or this is gone.’”

Obi says he relates to Paradise: “It's a roller coaster, a big part of me is still in shock about the whole thing, especially because I haven't seen my house in person. I've only seen pictures from neighbors seeing what happened to it. … I really wish that I had more of a forewarning about the fire danger versus just the wind danger and power outages, because I would have loved to grab more of my special stuff.”

Paradise left his house on the morning of January 7, “just to avoid the chaos that can happen up there,” then returned the next day. He recalls, “We just got up to our house, and it was straight-up like an apocalyptic movie. … It just was black. … The whole area is just like a bomb went off. … There's a few cement posts … there's a fireplace, ironically enough. … It was cathartic to see it in a sense. There's a finality that you're like, ‘Okay, it's over.’ There's nothing to mull over about salvaging. But the realness of it … was heartbreaking.”

He adds, “It's all these things you don't think about, too, that are missing, just specific things that inspired you, or rugs, or things that came down in your family that you may not even value until they're gone. And it's overwhelming, the amount.”


Burned cars at Jeffrey Paradise's house in Las Flores Canyon. Photo credit: Jeffrey Paradise.

Now, Paradise and Obi say they are left with little more than their laptops and backpacks. 

Paradise points out that some 20,000 records are now gone, a vast collection he started at age 16 as a vinyl DJ. He’s also grieving his instruments. “You have relationships with your gear. It's not just, ‘Oh yeah, get a replacement...’ It will be a different guitar or different synth. So yeah, it's hard to process it all.”

Obi was actually buying new gear for his studio, which he set up in his back bedroom after a roommate moved out a few months ago. He only enjoyed that home studio for a week until it was gone. “I have a hard drive that's like my master drive, that's all my stems [audio files], all my music videos, everything. That was in that back room, studio room. Because if I was aware of fire damage, then I would have grabbed that.”


All that's left of Jeffrey Paradise's home in Las Flores Canyon. Photo credit: Jeffrey Paradise. 

Paradise emphasizes that in addition to the grief, he feels a sense of freedom now, and he’s looking ahead to new material. “I’ve been doing Poolside since 2011 and … I've got a lot of new thoughts and feelings that I've never thought I would ever have that are really real, which is … where music comes from … the music you stand behind. So there is a sense of the future of music for me. I'm excited. … I think my music will still be happy. My goal is to just handle this with grace and really just try to be there for my community like they've been there for me.”

Both plan to stay in LA. 

Paradise says that while he’s from San Diego and lived in the Bay Area, Poolside is very LA — the first record was created in Los Feliz at a friend’s pool house (hence the name). “I feel like LA has been really good to me in that way. And I do feel like I'm going to come back and … I don't know if I'm going to rebuild, but I'm going to keep going for sure.”

Obi says leaving LA would be “silly” to him. “My life is here, my work is here, my heart is here. I don't see why I can't have a future here, just despite all this.”

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