California (The Way I Say I Love You)

Album: Generation Rx (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • Good Charlotte vocalist Joel Madden married Nicole Richie in 2010; they had two children together: daughter Harlow and son Sparrow. They split their time between Los Angeles and Sydney.

    Madden told the BBC that this upbeat track, which concludes Good Charlotte's Generation Rx album, is a "love letter" to his two children. It's also an attempt to end the album up on a "hopeful" note, after talking on most of the album about inner struggles and the desire to kill the pain that's in all of us.

    "It stuck with me and [I thought] if there's going to be a message that I'm going to give up my kids," he said, "if you summed all this up and the pain of being a human, is there a positive ending?"

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