Matt Costa, Santa Rosa Fangs

I may have underestimated Matt Costa. No, scratch that — going by Santa Rosa Fangs, I definitely underestimated Matt Costa. I’ve only seen him live once, back in the mid-2000s when he was touring with surf-folk guy Jack Johnson; my wife was a big Jack Johnson fan, at the time, and so we went to see him play, along with his opener, this quirky folk-pop guy named Matt Somethingsomething.

The show wasn’t great, it’s true, but it was fun, just laidback and happy and mellow (it was a Jack Johnson show, so, y’know). I remember liking Costa more than the headliner, at the time, but then when I followed up I heard his music and mostly shrugged. It was decent — again, not great, but fun — and somewhat forgettable.

So I was mildly curious when I saw Costa was doing a low-key, very personal-sounding house tour for his new album, Santa Rosa Fangs, and wondered what the heck the guy was like these days, more than a decade down the road.

Quite a lot, as it turns out. Santa Rosa Fangs is less an “album” and more a memoir set to music, an intense, thoughtful, nostalgic look backwards at Costa’s youth on the California coast, falling in love, getting hurt, making and losing friends, hanging out, and all the rest. Costa bookends the music with a handful of spoken pieces — “Chapters” — which are him reminiscing about first loves or musing about the nature of California as a whole, sometimes just with his voice and sometimes backed by fragile, almost chamber-music-like instrumentation.

And the whole is pretty breathtaking, a wide-ranging examination of youth and friendship and love and death and the Golden State and the loss of innocence. The music fits like a glove, too, twisting and turning through various chunks of sunny-yet-melancholy pop with an effortless ease.

Costa starts out with the Beatlesque “I Remember It Well,” all jaunty barroom piano, brushed drums, and John Lennon vocals, but then shifts seamlessly into a Tom Petty homage with the gorgeous Americana raveup of “Sharon” and later into “Pacific Grove,” a warm-hearted burst of folk-rock that makes me think of Paul Simon and Bon Iver in equal measure (albeit with the energy of underrated rockers Winterpills).

The title track is a beautiful but cautionary love song, slathered in a syrupy layer of ear-filling ahh-ahh vocals, guitar washes, and delicate piano, masking the gentle admonishing with the lush sound. “Grudge” does something similar, but in a different direction, taking a sweet, wide-smiling, backhanded swipe at a rival (or an old friend, maybe?) and keeping things pretty rather than making everything ugly and mean.

“Time Tricks” is again bouncy and Beatlesque, although to my ears the track sounds less Lennon and more McCartney than the first, while “Coming Around” reminds me of The Lemonheads at their absolute best and “Windy Smile” is a perfect, minute-long little piece of Nick Drake-ish folk. “Real Love” goes in the opposite direction, music-wise, with Costa crafting an utterly dense — but still hazy and drifting — wall-of-sound duet with an unnamed female singer.

Still bouncing from one pop style to another, Costa goes from the ’60s-sounding, almost church-y vocals and somber, fingerpicked guitar of “I Remember It Well #2” to a ’70s vibe with “Evening Star,” which brings to mind Ben Folds at his most earnest.

No matter the style, though, it’s the songs themselves that count, and count they do. I’m drawn in particular to “Ritchie,” a story-song about a local guy and the girl who loved/loves him but has to let him go in the end that’s punctuated by these solemn horns; it’s a great, wonderfully-constructed song, one I keep wanting to hear again and again so I can peel back the story a little bit more.

There aren’t many songwriters out there who can do that, at least not to me — the only three that come to mind are Springsteen, Craig Finn, and Steve Earle, and that’s not bad company to find yourself in. Similar things happen to me throughout Santa Rosa Fangs, and once I’ve listened all the way along, I want to go back in and hear more of the story.

Now that I’m thinking about it some more, maybe I’m wrong, and Santa Rosa Fangs isn’t so much a memoir of Costa’s own life but an elegy, a remembrance of a childhood place, a state and a town, that no longer really exists — not like it used to, at least. I’ve got no idea who first said, “you can’t go home again,” but they were spot-on; it just doesn’t work. It’ll never be like it once was, because the magic of that time (which you might not have even realized was magic, back then) is gone, is different, is now somebody else’s magic, not yours.

I can’t say for sure that Costa himself realizes that, but from the music here, it sure sounds like he does. Call it a memoir, call it a tribute to a long-gone youth, call it a yearning for a mythologized California that might never have existed in the first place — Santa Rosa Fangs is all those things, in one way or another, and a brilliant masterwork of a folk-pop album besides.