Pants Wilder

“The video was made by a girl in France.” Andrew Caddick is on the phone talking about his alter ego and musical project Jeans Wilder. The video for “Sparkler,” a song off 2010’s Nice Trash features a naked woman cavorting as if at a nudist ranch. “I don’t know where the filmmaker got the inspiration from,” he says. “In fact, I’ve never met or talked to her.” The production was set up by Caddick’s old French label, La Station Radar. “Maybe it was a language-barrier thing, but I was usually the last to know when something was gonna happen.”

Caddick, 28, former co-owner of the Tin Can Alehouse, lives in Golden Hill. His new Jeans Wilder CD, Totally, was released on Tuesday (June 26). “There are people that will want Nice Trash II,” he says, “and maybe this record follows along the same mathematics. But even when I was recording it, I thought, People will really like it...or not.... I stopped making really outsider music with tape hiss and noise, and maybe I’ve alienated that group. The people who want noise will be disappointed.”

If the down-tempo lo-fi approach on Nice Trash is the sound of depression, then Totally is the sound of depression on mood elevators.

“To make a record this poppy is something I never expected to do,” Caddick says. “I think it’s my best one yet, not to toot my own horn.”

Totally might never have come to pass if not for a computer glitch. “There was a whole version of stuff recorded that I lost when my computer crashed.” In the meantime, he’d gotten signed to Everloving Records, and suddenly there was budget to get new equipment. “I recorded version number two, which we all decided wasn’t very good. That in turn led to the creation of the record that is coming out.”

But, Jeans Wilder? “People pronounce it Jahn,” Caddick says, “like it was a French word, but it’s not. It’s jeans. Pants — Pants Wilder. I used to toss around band names all the time, and I could never settle on one. I was starting and stopping projects every two weeks with a different band name.” The plural of jean, he says, struck him as being funny. “I originally wanted Reefer Southerland, which, oddly enough, was already taken.”

Is there any possibility that the same filmmaker, the French woman who made the “Sparkle” video, might likewise shoot some footage for Totally? “She made two of my videos back then,” he says, “and I haven’t heard from her since.”