Foxtails Brigades return to Monterey for an intimate show at Pierce Ranch.

Foxtails Brigade frontwoman Laura Weinbach is good at finding musical inspiration in conceptual places. Her hatred of the holiday season birthed the infectious 2012 anti-Christmas tune “I’m Not Really in the Christmas Mood.”

“Families are fickle things in reality/ and tenderness has lost its clear/ so I’m not really in the Christmas mood this year,” Weinbach croons with a sultry quality Billie Holiday could appreciate.

Three years later, Weinbach found her muse in an old Berkeley Hills mansion, which helped inspire the Oakland chamber pop outfit’s video for their haunting single “Far Away And Long Ago.”

“The song’s about the desertion of refined old-world beauty and craftsmanship, in exchange for the economy of new-world innovations and machines,” Weinbach explains. “It’s paralleled by the story that the house seemed to tell with the remains of it’s original, detailed, hand-crafted art deco architecture ignored by soggy leftover early-’90s furniture and random florescent-colored paint jobs.”

The masterfully shot video snagged the Best Music Video Award at the 2015 Atlanta Underground Film Festival.

A couple weeks ago, the Foxtails Brigade crew – featuring Judgement Day’s Anton Patzner (violin and guitar), Joe Lewis (bass), Josh Pollock and Dominic Mercurio (percussion) – unleashed a cover of Joanna Newsome’s “Book of Right On,” which has been scoring a lot of online attention: “No one will argue that Newsom is a brilliant musician, but many are turned off by her warbly voice,” according to SFCritic.com. “Laura Weinbach’s smooth and controlled voice blasts that concern out of the park.”


FOXTAILS BRIGADE 8pm Friday, Nov. 6. Pierce Ranch Vineyards, 499 Wave St., Monterey. $12 (limited to 25 tickets). 372-8900, www.piercevineyards.com