B-Side Guys

Henry Grace’s “California Rain” operates in that particular emotional register where homesickness gets complicated by the fact that you’re not sure which place qualifies as home anymore. As the fourth single from his forthcoming album ‘Things Are Moving All Around Me,’ the track functions as wistful postcard from Grace’s early twenties in Los Angeles—except postcards typically know their destination, and this one drifts between California and his native London without ever fully landing.

Co-produced with Blaine Harrison of Mystery Jets and recorded live to tape at Middle Farm Studios in Devon, the production captures the atmospheric drift Grace describes as running through the album like a thread. Those reverb-laced guitars create space that feels both wide-open and claustrophobic, the way memory compresses geography until entire cities exist as emotional temperature rather than actual place. The drums tumble gently beneath Grace’s low-cloud vocal delivery, which carries quiet nostalgia edged with something harder to pin down—not quite restlessness, not quite resignation, but the peculiar ache of missing a place you already left behind.

What makes this compelling beyond standard expatriate melancholy is Grace’s refusal to romanticize that Los Angeles period without qualification. The track sits within an album examining transitions—love lost and found, changing cities, changing selves—and “California Rain” captures that specific moment when you realize that moving somewhere didn’t solve what you thought it would, but also gave you something you can’t quite articulate or abandon. Grace moved to California at 21, played small clubs in LA and San Francisco, absorbed Bon Iver and Ray Lamontagne into his writing DNA, then returned to London to front an actual band rather than remaining solitary troubadour.

The live-to-tape recording choice matters here. Unlike the stark arrangements of his 2022 debut ‘Alive In America,’ this reflects Grace’s evolution into bandleader, the warmth of amplifiers and room acoustics creating texture that mirrors the emotional complexity of looking backward while moving forward. There’s yearning in every element, but it’s yearning that knows satisfaction won’t arrive through geographic solution. Sometimes California rain is just what you call the specific loneliness you felt in better weather, the distance you needed to travel to understand what home meant in the first place.