A new band called Almost Angels has a local hit with a song they wrote during the Kincade Fire called “In God We Trust.”
Band member Garrison Krohn, who lives in Sebastopol and often busks in front of Pacific Market, said he and band mate Brandon Moser wrote the song after he witnessed an altercation at Starbucks in Rohnert Park, where evacuees were queued up around the block to get coffee and tempers got short.
Krohn saw a woman cut into the line of cars — it wasn’t clear to him whether she did it on purpose or simply didn’t notice the line — but things got ugly fast.
“The other people in the line started turning against her,” Krohn said. “It was early, they had no sleep, and they needed their coffee, and the whole line was like ‘Off with her head!’ This one lady got out of her car and went over and stood in front of the other lady’s car — I was watching this from about five feet away — and she was like ‘You’re going to move right now.’ So the lady in the car decides she’s had enough and starts moving her car, kind of revving it, like she’s gonna hit the lady in front of her car, and that’s when I saw the line was crossed and I broke it up. I came in like ‘Look it’s just some coffee, OK? It’s going to be there.’
“So I came back to the studio and I was like, man, people are really scared. It’s kind of crazy what’s going on. And we should write a song about it.”
“In God We Trust” is an indie-pop, rap response to his experience at Starbucks and to the fires in general — a “Let it Be” anthem for our new fire-wracked reality.
Krohn said they just hit 22,000 likes on Facebook, and more than 4,200 people have watched the lyric video on YouTube.
Krohn and Moser, who met six months ago and started writing songs together, have been recording music to release on an EP, but they felt so strongly that the world needed the message of “In God We Trust,” that they rushed it into production. They went from words on paper to releasing the song in just two days.
Despite the religious-sounding name of the band and the title of the song, Moser and Krohn said they don’t consider themselves part of the Christian music genre.
“We don’t fit into a genre,” Moser said, though they both agreed there were pop, rap, alternative, R&B and even country aspects to their music. As musical influences, they named Ed Sheeran, Johnny Cash and the rapper NF.
They are donating any money they make from the song to victims of the Kincade Fire.
Hear their song, “In God We Trust” on Facebook at facebook.com/almostangelsmusic.
