music that reminds me of san francisco 

Harry Belafonte

When I moved to San Francisco in 2013, I worked overnight as a copy editor. I added “Day-o” to a Spotify playlist designed for this circumstance. (“Work all night on a drink of rum! Daylight come and me wan’ go home”). In our quest to get our foots through the competitive real estate door, my roommate and I shared rooms on Airbnb until we found an $1,800/mo studio to split by the panhandle. I would eventually associate Belafonte with the halcyon weekend days where we would wake up in glorious sunlight and then cook grand breakfasts while singing and dancing in our kitchen. 

Bleached

The album Ride Your Heart embodies the energy that I felt moving from Kansas to San Francisco at the age of 22: rock ‘n roll, urgent, punk. At that time, which I would argue was the height of modern San-Francisco-ness (people were actually wearing Google glasses), I arrived in outsider fashion with a flip-phone. I’d never downloaded an app before, and I consciously opposed using Yelp. I would slowly find that sightings of my non-smart phone caused audible gasps (one shriek), my peers lived in condos thrice the price of what I could even fathom paying, and the word on the street was that artists couldn’t live here anymore. But for a while, I enjoyed being oblivious and listening to this album until my roommate couldn’t stand it anymore, which I totally get now. The songs are pretty annoying.

Mac Demarco

I found Mac Demarco on Spotify's discover page while I was working all night. It was like Rock and Roll Night Club knew exactly where I wanted to be: at a weirdo night club,  instead of a wannabe startup. We always ran out of snacks. Everyone knows that a real San Francisco startup has a never-ending supply of snacks in fixtures like La Croix fountains, organic cereal dispensers, and kegs of real Butterbeer imported from Hogsmeade. Right? 

Tomorrow’s Tulips

Tomorrow's Tulips evoke that unexpected lo-fi self-love you sometimes realize while you contemplate feeling lost in the frenetic world, like a combination of DGAF, resignation, and indie-movie-approved contentment. It’s like sitting before a grey ocean, and feeling less alone.

Japanther

Working a night job and still trying to have a life sometimes required pulling all-nighters, all-day-ers, lots of coffee—and energetic music. I listened to the driving rhythm of Japanther to work an internship on top of my full-time job. After my graveyard shift, I put them on Spotify on my shiny new iPhone, when I walked through the Tenderloin at 5:30am and boarded a bus before dawn to get to Chinatown at daybreak in order to catch a few hours of sleep in a storage room so I could get to my new internship at 10 am. I also listened to Japanther to stay awake through the night shift after having volunteered on a historic WWII ship all day. Eventually my lifestyle included thinking I was dying.

Girls

I crossed paths with Christopher Owens sometimes strangely frequently in the synchronicity we shared as flâneurs — him, a successful artist who afforded walking around in the afternoon, and I, a nightshift worker desperate for sunlight.

Kurt Vile

Walkin’ on a pretty day, enough said.

Bomba Estereo

Finally, after more than a whole year, I quit my night shift and got a job at a cafe. Even the weekend brunch shift was less manic than the workload at the night job. My coworkers were artists and students. I finally got out to music and literary events. So I listened to music that reminded me I loved to dance and be infatuated and that the world was full of places to experience (which is, after all, debatable).