This event is 21 and over.
$25.00 – General Admission
$75.00 – 4-Pack General Admission (Advance)
*plus applicable service fees
Tickets available at The Independent box office (628 Divisadero, SF) with no service charge.
All doors & show times subject to change.
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Black Pumas
When Black Pumas made their self-titled debut in 2019, the Austin-bred duo set off a reaction almost as combustible and rapturous as their music itself. Along with earning a career total of seven Grammy Award nominations (including Album Of The Year) and winning praise from leading outlets like Pitchfork and Rolling Stone, singer/songwriter Eric Burton and guitarist/producer Adrian Quesada achieved massive success as a live act, touring large theaters all over Europe and North and South America and delivering a transcendent show Burton aptly refers to as “electric church.” As they set to work on their highly awaited sophomore album, the band broadened their palette to include a dazzling expanse of musical forms: heavenly hybrids of soul and symphonic pop, mind-bending excursions into jazz-funk and psychedelia, starry-eyed love songs that feel dropped down from the cosmos. Wilder and weirder and more extravagantly composed than its predecessor, Chronicles of a Diamond arrives as the fullest expression yet of Black Pumas’ frenetic creativity and limitless vision.
In creating the follow-up to one of the most celebrated debuts in recent years, Black Pumas made a point of tuning out any sense of anticipation from the outside world. “I knew the first record was good when we finished it, but I had no idea people would respond like they did,” says Quesada. “This time around there was a lot of pressure and expectation that we hadn’t felt before, which was overwhelming at times, but we did our best to tune that out and focus on trusting ourselves like we always have.” As a result, Chronicles of a Diamond wholly echoes an essential intention behind its creation. “More than anything I wanted to make something we’d be thrilled to play live 200 days a year,” says Burton. “I wanted to be able to laugh, cry, bob my head, do the thing: it was all very much a selfish endeavor.”
Like Black Pumas, Chronicles of a Diamond once again harnesses the lightning-in-a-bottle chemistry between Burton (a self-taught musician who got his start busking on beaches and subway platforms in his native Los Angeles) and Quesada (a Grammy Award winner whose background includes playing in Latin-funk orchestra Grupo Fantasma and accompanying legendary artists like Prince). Produced by Quesada and primarily mixed by six-time Grammy Award winner Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, The War on Drugs), the ten-song LP finds Burton taking the role of co-producer and infusing his free-spirited musicality into every track. Although Black Pumas made much of the album at Quesada’s own Electric Deluxe Recorders in Austin, Chronicles of a Diamond also came to life in such far-flung cities as Amsterdam and Mexico City and San Francisco, with their longtime band joining in to shape the album’s explosive yet artfully crafted sound. “On the first record my goal was to make something that felt modern but without using any loops or programming or editing of any kind—everything was completely live,” says Quesada. “With this record, we threw out all those rules and created something that’s very much a studio album but also captures that crazy energy that happens in the live show.”
The first piece recorded for Chronicles of a Diamond, opening track “More Than a Love Song” instantly reveals the heightened creative freedom Black Pumas brought to the album-making process. After building a potent momentum with its brisk beats, effervescent strings, and brightly buzzing guitar riffs, the long-beloved live staple shapeshifts into a moment of pure unbridled exultation powered by radiant gospel harmonies and a spellbinding bit of spoken word from Burton. “My entire approach to singing was definitely informed by our live show,” Burton points out. “Whenever we take the stage it’s the classic us-against-the-world kind of thing, and in reaching for my greatest strengths I ended up discovering new ones. With this album I felt very free in my vocal performance, which has a lot to do with Adrian hearing something in my voice and helping me to explore that.”
Next, on “Ice Cream (Pay Phone),” Black Pumas present a fuzzed-out and falsetto-laced love song Burton wrote years ago, then further developed with bassist/keyboardist Josh Blue during an impromptu session at two in the morning. “When left alone I tend to work in an unorthodox way, where the colors don’t go together quite like you’d expect them to,” says Burton, whose lyrics playfully interpolate a classic jump-rope rhyme. “With that song the big distorted guitar doesn’t seem like it should work with how I’m singing, but it sounded so soulful in a way that felt just right to me.” Completed by Quesada at his studio, “Ice Cream (Pay Phone)” ultimately induces a trance-like euphoria thanks to its hypnotic rhythms and swirling guitar lines. “A lot of Eric’s ideas lately have had a meditative quality, where all these repetitive motifs are happening in the background while the song changes around them,” says Quesada. “As soon as I heard ‘Ice Cream’ I loved it, because it was so radically different from anything we’d done before, or anything I would’ve come up with on my own.”
On songs like “Mrs. Postman,” Black Pumas reaffirm their status as a vital force in moving the genre of soul music forward. A piano-driven serenade spotlighting the phenomenal versatility of keyboardist JaRon Marshall, the timeless yet exquisitely left-of-center track took shape from an off-the-cuff collaboration between Marshall and Quesada. “JaRon and I used to get together on afternoons and make hip-hop beats for fun, and ‘Mrs. Postman’ ended up coming out of one of those sessions,” says Quesada, noting that the song marks the first time Black Pumas have co-written with another musician. In adding his contribution to “Mrs. Postman,” Burton imbued his lyrics with equal parts idiosyncratic poetry and humanistic sensitivity. “I was partly thinking about how much joy the postmen can bring to people’s lives, but I also wanted to encourage the people in my family and anyone else working a blue-collar job,” he says. “I know from firsthand experience how arduous it can be, and I wanted to send a message saying, ‘I still see all the beauty and light in you.’”
As Chronicles of a Diamond unfolds, Black Pumas endlessly follow their outsize imagination into unexpected directions. To that end, the album’s sprawling title track emerged after Quesada unearthed a full-band recording they’d cut live at a San Francisco studio years earlier, then sampled and looped the most dynamic elements of that performance. Meanwhile, Burton dreamed up the lyrics to “Chronicles of a Diamond” by tapping into his deep affinity for Curtis Mayfield and penning a song from the perspective of a diamond in the back of a Cadillac. On “Angel,” the band shares a mesmerizing slow-burner graced with majestic guitar work, moody mellotron melodies, and soul-baring lyrics Burton composed in a laundromat over a decade ago. “I remember feeling overwhelmed by everything going on with my family and the neighborhood I was living in, and hoping to find sanctuary in the actual voice of an angel,” he says. “There was a laundromat nearby that served as a quiet place for me, and that song started to come to me as I stared into a still-life painting of flowers.” And on “Hello,” Chronicles of a Diamond takes on an otherworldly quality, casting a powerful spell with the track’s sublime synth tones and celestial harmonies (courtesy of Black Pumas background vocalists Lauren Cervantes and Angela Miller). “Eric brought in that odd synth loop, and I loved the idea of building a song around something so out of the ordinary for us,” says Quesada. “It was probably the most challenging song for me to finish, but mostly because I was completely obsessed with it and needed to get it right.”
On “Rock and Roll,” Chronicles of a Diamond closes out with a gloriously strange epic that Black Pumas first began developing during sound checks and mainly recorded at a spur-of-the-moment session at an Amsterdam studio. “We were on tour and I was feeling excited about life and wanted to capture that, and somehow convinced everyone that going into the studio was the most fun thing we could do with our time in Amsterdam,” says Burton. One of several tracks featuring additional production from John Congleton (a Grammy Award winner known for his work with St. Vincent and Angel Olsen), “Rock and Roll” fully channels the raw urgency of that session while encompassing so many eccentric details, including a deluge of delightfully warped vocal effects. “Eric was in my studio and we started running his vocals through my Space Echo—a tape-delay unit from the ’70s—then manipulated that into what you hear at the end of the song,” says Quesada. “At one point the track was almost ten-minutes-long; we were just having so much fun playing around and recording the craziest sounds we could come up with.”
For Quesada, one of the most memorable experiences in the making of Chronicles of a Diamond took place on a solo trip to Mexico City in the final stages of the album’s production. “I was finishing up a lot of the sonic manipulation of the tracks and needed to be completely immersed, which ended up feeling like a very full-circle moment,” he recalls. “That same summer when I first started working with Eric, it was in Mexico City that I got inspired by the whole jungle-cats motif—which is how we came up with the name Black Pumas.” First introduced by a mutual friend back in 2017, after Quesada began seeking a potential collaborator who “liked Neil Young as much as Sam Cooke,” the two musicians quickly felt a near-telepathic musical connection. “We never had to discuss much or plot out what we wanted to do with the project—it all came together so easily and naturally,” says Quesada. “The way Eric creates is so in-the-moment and fits perfectly with how my brain works, and it makes everything immediately come to life in a way that’s so exciting and inspiring.”
When it came time to create Chronicles of a Diamond, Black Pumas leaned into that intuitive understanding while pushing their artistry to an entirely new level. “Making this album was much different from playing acoustic guitar by myself and writing from a place of self-reflection like I have in the past,” says Burton. “It felt like a metamorphosis in a way that was both beautiful and difficult, but in the end feels more true to who we are as collaborators.” In sharing the album with the world, the band hopes to impart a similarly transformative sense of joy and discovery. “I hope when people hear the record they feel the same excitement that we felt while we were making it,” says Burton. “And I hope they understand that being excited about life isn’t synonymous with having everything you’ve always wanted—it’s something we can all choose today, and every single day moving forward.”
Neal Francis
On his new album In Plain Sight, Neal Francis offers up a body of work both strangely enchanted and painfully self-aware, unfolding in songs sparked from Greek myths and frenzied dreams and late-night drives in the depths of summer delirium. True to its charmed complexity, the singer/songwriter/pianist’s second full-length came to life over the course of a tumultuous year spent living in a possibly haunted church in Chicago. The result: a portrait of profound upheaval and weary resilience, presented in a kaleidoscopic sound that’s endlessly absorbing.
The follow-up to Francis’s 2019 debut Changes—a New Orleans-R&B-leaning effort that landed on best-of-the-year lists from the likes of KCRW, KEXP, and The Current, and saw him hailed as “the reincarnation of Allen Toussaint” by BBC Radio 6—In Plain Sight was written and recorded almost entirely at the church, a now-defunct congregation called St. Peter’s UCC. Despite not identifying as religious, Francis took a music-ministry job at the church in 2017 at the suggestion of a friend. After breaking up with his longtime girlfriend while on tour in fall 2019, he returned to his hometown and found himself with no place to stay, then headed to St. Peter’s and asked to move into the parsonage. “I thought I’d only stay a few months but it turned into over a year, and I knew I had to do something to take advantage of this miraculous gift of a situation,” he says.
Mixed by Grammy Award-winner Dave Fridmann (HAIM, Spoon, The Flaming Lips, Tame Impala), In Plain Sight finds Francis again joining forces with Changes producer and analog obsessive Sergio Rios (a guitarist/engineer known for his work with CeeLo Green and Alicia Keys). Like its predecessor, the album spotlights Francis’s refined yet free-spirited performance on piano, an instrument he took up at the age of four. “From a very early age, I was playing late into the night in a very stream-of-consciousness kind of way,” he says, naming everything from ragtime to gospel soul to The Who among his formative influences. With a prodigy-like gift for piano, Francis sat in with a dozen different blues acts in Chicago clubs as a teenager, and helmed a widely beloved instrumental funk band called The Heard before going solo. Along with earning lavish acclaim (including a glowing review from Bob Lefsetz, who declared: “THIS IS THE FUTURE OF THE MUSIC BUSINESS!”), Changes led to such triumphs as performing live on KCRW’s “Morning Becomes Eclectic,” sharing the stage with members of The Meters at the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and touring with such acts as Lee Fields & The Expressions and Black Pumas.
Recorded entirely on tape with his bandmates Kellen Boersma (guitar), Mike Starr (bass), and Collin O’Brien (drums), In Plain Sight bears a lush and dreamlike quality, thanks in large part to Francis’s restless experimentation with a stash of analog synths lent by his friends in his early days at the church. “My sleep schedule flipped and I’d stay up all night working on songs in this very feverish way,” he says. “I just needed so badly to get completely lost in something.” In a move partly inspired by Led Zeppelin’s Houses of the Holy, In Plain Sight takes its title from a track Francis ended up scrapping from the album. “It’s a song about my breakup and the circumstances that led to me living in the church, where I’m owning up to all my problems within my relationships and my sobriety,” says Francis, whose first full-length chronicles his struggles with addiction. “It felt like the right title for this record, since so much of it is about coming to the understanding that I continue to suffer because of those problems. It’s about acknowledging that and putting it out in the open in order to mitigate the suffering and try to work on it, instead of trying to hide everything.”
The opulent opening track to In Plain Sight, “Alameda Apartments” makes for a majestic introduction to the album’s unveiling of Francis’s inner demons. “I started writing that song maybe six years ago, before I got sober,” he says. “I was going through another breakup and getting kicked out of my place, and I had a nightmare about moving into an art-deco apartment that was haunted, where the walls were all shifting around.” A prime showcase for Francis’s piano work, “Alameda Apartments” simulates that dream state in its untethered melodies, luminous grooves, and lyrics that drift from despair to detached curiosity (e.g., “It remains to be seen if the ghosts are all right”). “The craziest thing is that I’d never encountered the name ‘Alameda’ in any time in my life prior to that dream,” says Francis. “It’s bizarre that I even remembered it, especially since you don’t dream very often when you’re getting fucked up.”
On “Problems,” In Plain Sight eases into a brighter and breezier mood, with Francis mining inspiration from early-’70s Sly & the Family Stone and the glistening soft rock of Mirage-era Fleetwood Mac. But in a stark contrast to the track’s radiant synth and rapturous harmonies, “Problems” centers on Francis’s exacting introspection. “It’s about being half-in and half-out of a relationship, and how untenable that is,” he says. “I wrote it at a time when I really couldn’t maintain a relationship, because I had too many issues with myself that needed to be addressed.”
Graced with a smoldering slide-guitar solo from the legendary Derek Trucks, “Can’t Stop the Rain” arrives as the first unabashedly hopeful moment on In Plain Sight. “I wrote that with my buddy David Shaw, who came up with the refrain and this idea that even though life’s going to throw all this shit at you, there’s still so many things to be grateful for,” says Francis. Propelled by the track’s cascading piano lines and wildly soaring vocals, that refrain takes on an unlikely anthemic power as Francis shares a bit of gently expressed encouragement: “You can’t stop the rain/It’s always coming down/It’s always gonna fall/But you’re not gonna drown.”
On the guitar-heavy and glorious “Prometheus,” Francis nods to the Greek myth of the Titan god who stole fire from Mount Olympus and gave it to the humans. As punishment, Prometheus spent eternity chained to a rock as an eagle visited each day to peck out his liver—which then grew back overnight, only to be eaten again the following day in a neverending cycle of torment. “That song came from the lowest ebb of quarantine, when Chicago was literally on fire,” Francis says. “It came to me while I was driving around all these abandoned streets in the middle of the night, and turned into a song about facing my problems with addiction and feeling like I’m chained to this set of compulsions.” Threaded with plainspoken confession (“It’s not in my nature to try to do better”), the track features a sprawling synth arrangement informed by the many hours Francis spent playing the St. Peter’s pipe organ. “I call that section of the song ‘The Pope,’” he says. “It’s this grand, powerful entry that’s sort of sinister, and then it just drops away.”
By the end of his surreal and sometimes eerie experience of living at the church—“I’m convinced that the stairway leading to the choir loft where I used to practice is haunted,” he notes—Francis had found his musicality undeniably elevated. “Because I was forced into this almost monastic existence and was alone so much of the time, I could play as often and as long as I wanted,” he says. “I ended up becoming such a better pianist, a better writer, a better reader of music.” Dedicated to a woman named Lil (the de facto leader of the St. Peter’s congregation), In Plain Sight ultimately reveals the possibility of redemption and transformation even as your world falls apart.
“When I started the process of writing these songs, I was so emotionally out-of-sorts and really kind of hopeless that I’d be able to come up with anything,” says Francis. “But then I sat down and started working, and embraced whatever inspiration came my way. Sometimes it felt like beating my head against a wall, but I tried to trust that it would lead somewhere. The whole thing was like a weird dream—this very strange time of terrible, wonderful isolation.”