Cassie Ramone (Vivian Girls, The Babies) Releases First New Solo Album In Nine Years
Cassie Ramone, the former leader of Vivian Girls and the Babies, released her debut album The Time Has Come way back in 2014, after the first Vivian Girls breakup. A year later, she followed that one with the holiday LP Christmas In Reno. Now, as the Babies gear up for reunion shows in New York and LA, Ramone has self-released Sweetheart, her third solo album.
On first listen, Sweetheart is a fuzzy, starry-eyed lo-fi pop record. Cassie Ramone recorded it with her friend Dylan White, and it’s inspired by family road trips that she took when she was a kid. Mac DeMarco appears on the song “The Only Way I Know How.” On Instagram, Ramone says that she’ll eventually put Sweetheart up on streaming services. Right now, though, it’s only available Cindy Lee-style — as a single-track YouTube stream or as MP3 downloads that you can buy directly from Ramone. Here’s what she says about the album:
Dear Listener,
It is with gratitude and joy that I am presenting you with my new album, SWEETHEART.
When I was young, most of my family vacations were to America’s great National Parks out West. We would fly out, rent a car, spend a few days at one national park, and then my dad would drive us to the next one. These drives would often be over ten hours long. I had my Discman and a stash of Lois Duncan books to keep me company, but I mostly remember staring at the stars out of the car window. There were so many stars compared to back East.
I would squint and look for a star that resembled a tiny key. Then I’d wish on that star. The key in the star would open the box of my dreams, and my dreams were sure to come true.
In the summer of 1994, my family and I moved from Hackensack, NJ, to Ridgewood, NJ. I was eight years old. On our first day in the new house, I remember sitting on the plush white carpet of my mostly empty new bedroom. All of my things were still in their moving boxes, so there was “nothing to do.” Out of determination, I found a small boombox somewhere, plugged it into my wall, and found 103.9 WFAS-FM, the “adult-contemporary” radio station of the time. I think a Mariah Carey song was on. The magical voices coming from the box had me spellbound. It was then that I knew what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.
The last time we checked in was in 2019, when Vivian Girls released Memory. A lot has happened since then. I moved back to New York from Los Angeles, kind of by accident. I got a job working the night shift at an Amazon warehouse in Carteret, NJ. I quit drinking. I got engaged. I went back to school and got a certificate, hoping to land in the corporate world. I spent 24 hours in jail.
I have spent the last few years working as a driver for food delivery apps. I am still working for one of them at the time of this writing. I played two shows in four years: one was in Barcelona, and one was at my rehab talent show. I wasn’t really making music or even planning on making an album. But God has his ways.
My dear friend and long-time collaborator Dylan White and his wife married in Las Vegas in late 2021. It was there that we came up with the idea of making a record together.
I had many song fragments that came from one of my main nighttime hobbies during the lockdowns: sitting on the back steps of where I was living, drinking from a flask of cheap liquor, setting small bonfires in these aluminum cans, and singing to myself. I would record myself singing a capella into my phone’s voice recorder—pieces of an idea that came into my head like a ghost.
From there, most of SWEETHEART was recorded in Richmond, Virginia, between December 2023 and March 2024, in Dylan’s Valley Structures barn shed.
I spent much of that winter driving back and forth between New York and Richmond in my 2006 Toyota Corolla. I brought a bunch of disposable cameras with me, and then I started filming my travels and later, my everyday life. Then I got the idea to make a full-length music video for the album. I wanted it to feel like disposable cameras do—weird captured memories that tell a disjointed story. Some of the photos didn’t come out very well—sometimes there’s a finger on the lens, or the flash didn’t go off. And yet, the collection of photos remains a gift box, a singular treasure.
In a sense, the music is like that too. A few of these songs are very old. Many of them took years to finish. I remember smoking cigarettes, staring into space in the freezing cold Virginia night like I was waiting for an old friend to pick up the phone. At some point I would turn away, and then the phone would ring, and I would answer. I would hear the voice of someone I loved guiding me, and the rest of the song would reveal itself to me.
Dylan once said that describing music is like trying to tell someone about the dream you had last night. I agree. So I’ll just say about SWEETHEART: it’s “a Cassie Ramone version of a pop album inspired by pop music past and present.”
When our sessions were over, I would drive back to New York into the cold late hours of the night, much like my dad used to do. These drives often took me in strange directions as I looked for cheap gas or an open Dunkin’ Donuts. One time I found myself in an open field near a casino. I looked up at the sky. I saw a star, and I saw a key.
A return to my childhood wish.
A return to my dreams.
So, in that spirit, I share this with you.
Love,
Cassie Ramone
Stream Sweetheart below.
You can buy Sweetheart here.
