When speaking of San Francisco these days, it seems like it is stereotypically presented as either a city full of young tech nomads lining up for artisanal coffee, or as a blighted, urban hellscape of fentanyl zombies and street crime. But with his sixth solo album 24th Street Blues (due out October 6th), Tom Heyman sings of a more rank-and-file San Francisco, balancing the encroaching darkness of an overdeveloped cityscape with the fragile, abiding beauty of the Golden Gate City.
“If you stay in one place long enough you really start to see it change.” He explains, “Around 2010, the city started to feel like a movie that was sped up, jerking and lurching forward at a dangerously fast, celluloid-shredding pace with market forces feeling like a locomotive bearing down on anything or anyone in its path.”
For over two decades, Heyman and his wife have lived in a sprawling, dilapidated, converted-storefront rental on 24th Street – deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district. 24th Street Blues details his observations and interactions from years of living and working in the neighborhood as it weathered the storms and the aftermath of plutocratic expansion. When listening to the hardscrabble sagas that thread these songs together, it doesn’t sound like Heyman deliberately sought to create a concept album so much as he inadvertently followed the Mark Twain credo, “Write what you know.”
Here, the characters of his songs strive to exist (and sometimes perish) under looming cranes that dot the city skyline. Heyman braids timeless sounding singer-songwriter narratives with Barbary Coastal Americana that at times recalls the rusty, boiler-room reverberations of The Basement Tapes or the smoldering boogie of JJ Cale. Other moments are reminiscent of Gordon Lightfoot’s beautifully sparse melodies and John Prine’s penchant for an economy of words. Over mostly acoustic tapestries, Heyman sings stories of displaced families, endangered bohemians, migrant workers, sidewalk hustlers, surviving musicians, juvenile delinquents, weathered barkeeps, junkie friends, unhoused encampments, cannabis farmers, and slumlord arsonists.
24th Street Blues presents portraits of a San Francisco where dues are never paid in full, but flowers still bloom from the ashes of the digital goldrush. Like any good long-player, these songs work a deeper magic on the listener with repeated listens. His lyrics take residence in the periphery of your mind like the spectral passages of a Denis Johnson novel. Whether he’s darkening the doors of the city’s Victorians or sharing a drink with a veteran bartender, Heyman has haunted the enduring and evaporating pockets of San Francisco’s heyday long enough to become one of the living ghosts of his own songs.
Today Glide is excited to premiere the album’s title track, an impressive work of quiet and ponderous folk-rock filled with the kind of vivid, literary imagery that would make Prine smile. With his soft-spoken vocals, Heyman offers a snapshot of a changing city that is one of the most on-the-street portrayals of a beautiful city that is often in the news these days for all of the wrong reasons. Heyman’s dreamy tune examines the powers of change, decay, nostalgia and growth while taking the listener right onto the street in a way that is so poignant you can practically hear the traffic and feel the shiver of the fog of the bay creeping in on a dark night. Heyman has long been one of our great underrated songwriters and musicians, and this titular track only further solidifies his status as a master lyricist.
Heyman reflects on the inspiration behind the tune:
I have lived in the same apartment on 24th Street, on the Eastern edge of the Mission District for more than 20 years now. I love it in the morning when folks are sweeping the sidewalk in front of their businesses, and I love it in the afternoon when moms and dads are walking their kids home from school and shopping at Casa Lucas Market. I love it late at night on my way home from work, when folks are lined up for tacos at Vallarta laughing, joking, trying to keep the party going just a little while longer.
Lots of things have changed over the years, the laundromat I liked is now a condo, the panaderia where I used to get my coffee is now a condo, the whole corner lot from Harrison to Balmy Alley is now a senior living facility. I could go on and on… but so could anyone who has lived anywhere long enough.
The image that accompanies the song on You Tube and in my songbook is the view west on 24th from Potrero Avenue, and it reflects the shaded canopy that the huge Ficus trees created, a cool tunnel, that beautifully refracted the light and enabled one to walk in the shade all the way to Mission Street. Soon after I turned in the artwork, the city cut down almost everyone one of the Ficus trees…For a while, the bright sunlight, and the exposed facades of the apartments above the ground floor businesses made the street feel alien and unrecognizable, but the only constant in life is change and still 24th still feels like home.
LISTEN:
