California Love

California Love  is the mixtape of host Walter Thompson-Hernández’s coming of age in Los Angeles. The show sends you back to exact moments in his biography while conjuring emotions and experiences that are universal. One story is about a party line he used to call (think a landline chat room) and the show’s audio recreates precisely what it sounded like to flirt, catfish, and slide into DMs before the internet. The episode is a phenomenal use of the podcast medium, with actors simulating the phone conversations. “ Scared Straight ” is the portrait of the host as a young graffiti artist and lawbreaker struggling with his identity. Thompson-Hernández brings the series home with the perfect album closer, “ Ellie ”; it’s an ode to his mother, who moved to L.A. from Mexico as a teenager and who made this whole beautiful journey possible.  California Love  mimics time travel, using memories in unsentimental ways to get the clearest picture of life when the summers lasted a year, your role models were superheroes (for him, it was Kobe Bryant), and you had to get home for dinner before dark.