"All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco" by American Music Club
Songwriter Amy Linton didn't write a lot, directly, about SF, but this song from 2003's How I Learned to Write Backwards is one of her tributes to the city, and one of the band's more enduring songs. This brooding, 60s-ish song about hearing Mission bells ringing reminds me of my early days in the Bay Area, when my roommate loved this San Francisco band, and this album. And it's funny, when I first heard the song in '96, I was on the narrator's side, but now I think she's kind of a judgmental bitch. So why "San Francisco Bay" from a group from the U.K.? I've no idea, but I like to think that the character singing the song is an SF "free spirit" painting a picture of this man's forthcoming miserable (she claims) life in the East Bay. It's a sad song, in which a woman tries to convince a man to forego a boring suburban existence with one woman for the fun the singer presumably offers. is the chorus to this 1996 single from English 80s/90s pop group The Beautiful South. "Don’t Marry Her, Fuck Me" by The Beautiful SouthĪnd the Sunday sun shines down on San Francisco Bay Now, a little older, he's still rapping about his neighborhood, as in this 2010 release.
In 1996, he filmed one of his first videos, for "Shock the Party," in the former Outta Control (OC) project towers in the Fillmore. Oakland-born, Fillmore-district-raised rapper San Quinn made his first stage appearance at the age of 12 opening for Tupac Shakur in 1989. It also name-checks Union Street, Perry's, the Tenderloin, and the Berkeley Greek Theater, the latter in reference to The Postal Service's 2013 show there. This rambling song from the 2014 album Benji makes reference to Mark's friendship with Ben Gibbard, singer/songwriter of Death Cab For Cutie and The Postal Service. Between his Red House Painters days and the latter years as singer for Sun Kil Moon which he admitted was basically just a continuation of Red House Painters, rebranded in 2003 to get some new critical attention Kozelek has written an epic song cycle about, and evocative of, the city he calls home. Singer Mark Kozelek's love for San Francisco pervades most of his songbook. And I'm not just saying this to engineer some kind of meeting. Still not my cup of Anchor, but now I get it. (The track I did and still love from that record: " Round 'n' Round." So good!) But that was three years before I moved here, so I didn't have any idea how love for this town could fill you to the point of abject cheesiness. I didn't especially like it when I heard it on the 1993 album of the same name - even then, it felt like "Hello, Cleveland!" pandering to me. Then again, back in 1999, a rumored stalker allegedly set fire to his OS house, and the googling I had to do to find the preceding link suggests that his fans are, ahem, intense. And I've been in media for 10 years! So you'd think that our paths would have crossed, but, nope. I've lived in SF for 17 years, and in the Outer Sunset (where he lives/used to live, depending on whom you believe) for over a decade. Want to hear something weird? I've never met Chris Isaak. But this is one of the catchiest and best San Francisco songs you've never heard. It's a quirky little song about "meeting my love on the Golden Gate" that starts out with a funny intro about "a lot of songs have been written about San Francisco" and the requisite cable car reference.
The Velvet Fog himself wrote this tribute to a city he called "more welcoming" than New York. "Got the Gate on the Golden Gate" by Mel Tormé Whether it's Sun Kil Moon singing about eating crab cakes at Perry's, or Jerry Garcia singing about the Mission in the rain, this is what our real soundtrack is, when we're not in a ballpark.Ģ0. These songs form the lyrical base of SF's modern-day songbook.
We wanted to make a list of more obscure San Francisco songs, particularly those that mention actual places in the city, even if the references are just in passing. Let's get this out of the way: You won't find Tony Bennett on this list, or the equally great Judy Garland and her bouncy anthem " San Francisco." You also won't find any of the other generic San Francisco songs that everyone knows even though we'll admit that Journey's " Lights," which has been adopted by the Giants along with "Don't Stop Believin'," is probably the best song that's vaguely about San Francisco there is, even though Steve Perry admits the original lyric was "when the sun shines on L.A.," and he changed it because "the Bay" sounded better.