Sorry for the late issue! Back to the regular schedule next week.
Sometimes I think I’ve been to every venue in San Francisco. I know that it’s not true, but when I end up at the same one four times in a month, I feel like there just can’t be anybody playing anywhere else. I have little tricks—the mix is best closer to the back of this one, you can always get close to the front if you go around the back bathroom hallway of that one. When I buy tickets, I can picture the depth and width of the stage, gauge the intimacy of the show. I like knowing my public transit route, the best bar nearby, the layout of the space.
I saw Grace Ives at a familiar spot last week, a small, narrow room with checkerboard floors and a long bar in the back. When we arrived, the opener was already playing (I know, I’m sorry, I swear I’m not normally like this) and the room was packed with some of the tallest people in the city, for some reason. My friend and I slipped up to the front and proceeded to sweat through one of the strangest sets I’ve ever seen, a man with a microphone and a pretty face rapping to a track. He kept interrupting himself to whisper “San Francisco,” which elicited fewer and fewer cheers every time. At one point he played a song that sampled “Beauty and the Beast.”
I found out about Grace Ives because she opened for Remi Wolf in Portland last year. I was intrigued by how weird and confident she was, moving in a way that can only be described as surging, with no band. She sang mostly to a track, and sometimes played a little synth on a stand. Even then, I was enthralled by her performance. The crowd was kind of young and kind of mean, the worst audience to play to as an opener; they’re skeptical and boisterous and impolite. She didn’t seem bothered by them at all.
I’ve grown steadily more excited about her since that show. I read this Pitchfork profile piece about her written by one of my favorite staff writers that confirmed all the things about her that I suspected, and loved: she’s spacey, idiosyncratic, messy. Her music, like that of all my favorite artists, suggests these characteristics like watermarks on a page. She has an incredibly distinctive style, full of tinkling sounds and questioning lyrics, that has been present in her work since the very beginning, with her debut EP Really Hot (2016). She has this wild look, her curly hair going in every direction at once, her eyes huge and blue and consistently staring straight out into the audience.
Her voice is incredible, classically incredible. She doesn’t make it a focal point of her music, but at different points in the set I turned around to my friend and mouthed, “She’s a really good singer.” Her flip from her chest voice to her head voice is precise and stylized, she was never pitchy or strained. She filled up the room all on her own, without any instrumentalists’ energy to feed off of. Her banter was natural and honest; she was visibly moved by how many people knew the words to the songs.
When we were walking out, my friend brought up the fact that we had just witnessed a beautiful phenomenon: we got to see an artist in a space they had already outgrown. Grace Ives is a star, and seeing her in a hall of that size was exquisite. She and her show are so much bigger than that room, but it was intimate in a way that you could never attain in even a midsize venue.
I felt the same way about Remi Wolf when I saw her on a small afternoon stage at Outside Lands last year, right as she was blowing up. One of her songs, “Photo ID” off of I’m Allergic to Dogs! (2020), went viral on TikTok during the pandemic. By the time she released her first full-length record, Juno (2021), she was pulling crowds double and triple the size of those she had performed for in 2019.
Remi Wolf’s voice is raspy and full-bodied, her songs are genre-bending and endlessly creative, her writing is topical and honest, her performances are unhinged in the best way. She sprints around the stage for the full set and often gets on the ground and rolls around for a bit, all while singing or screaming, depending on the song.
She always does a cover and her choices are always tasteful and surprising, crowd-pleasing songs that are actually good. At this last show, she did “I Don’t Trust Myself (With Loving You),” which is sort of a deep cut off of Continuum (2006) if you’re only familiar with John Mayer’s hits. As I’m sure you’ve all noticed, I’m deep in my John Mayer era, so it was a delightful surprise when the band started playing the riff.
That same Outside Lands, I saw Caroline Polachek on a similarly sized afternoon stage. It was Halloween, and she was dressed as Marie Antoinette, complete with a mess of fake blood around her neck. She glided around the stage, tall and lithe and graceful, singing her heart out. Now that I’ve seen her a few times, I know that her show is carefully choreographed, with little dances at specific moments. Pang (2019) is such a groundbreaking album, so unlike anything else being made right now, that it was only a matter of time before she became insanely popular.
I’ve been lucky enough to see a few of these magical shows, those perfect moments in time that feel like the tippity-top of a rollercoaster, right before the big drop. Getting to see someone in a space they’ve outgrown is such a thrill; you can feel the energy in the room when everyone knows that the artist is going to be huge. You get to feel a little bit proud of them, a little bit lucky.
Is it that the artist has outgrown the space, or is it that they are so much in the zone, that they and the audience are at peak flow. I hear you about seeing artists who you know are going to have amazing careers. Sometimes you just know when you see someone perform.
"The crowd was kind of young and kind of mean, the worst audience to play to as an opener; they’re skeptical and boisterous and impolite. "
PDX can be a tough crowd. I can remember bands being booed off stage, and others being met with a wall of silent indifference. Some earned that scorn. Most absolutely did not.
And your friend is right; seeing an artist and just knowing they're already on to bigger/better things is a special kind of magic.