‘Postcard Memories’ Reminds Us That Home Is a Feeling

While on stage at this summer’s Lakefest event, Oakland-based musician Window showcased her unique combination of pop, folk, R&B and house influences. Her music is like love letters you can dance to.

In front of the stage, between Window and the scattered crowd of festival attendees, someone stood facing the audience. They were wearing a huge papier-mâché head that looked just like Window.

In an oversized mask with black locs, brown skin and big eyes, the person also held a huge postcard with a QR code linked to Window’s debut album, Postcard Memories.

Without knowing anything about Window, her music or the papier-mâché head, I was compelled to take a photo.

Months later, Window explains it all: why postcards are reflective of her upbringing, the way she found home in letters from loved ones, and how she uses her music to build musical homes for her listeners.

Window, who performs this weekend at San Francisco’s first Sapphic Pride Block Party, says she made the crafty cranium out of glue, water, newspaper, cardboard, paint and yarn. And she’s worn it herself.

“I actually went around the whole city,” says Window, explaining how she took BART between Oakland and San Francisco, “in that head, with that postcard.”

A DIY artist with a background in prop design for theater, Window has merged mixed-media arts and her music — and it made for a clever marketing move.

Plus, it’s an extended metaphor about her life.

As a kid, Window moved often. She spent the majority of her childhood around Chicago, as well as in New York and Switzerland. Partially raised by her grandparents, Window also spent time in “the system,” she says, in reference to child protective services.

“One of the few things that kept me connected to my foundation was my father,” Window says in a call with KQED.

Although he left the family when she was a baby, he’d send her postcards from the places he’d visit, and she’d keep them in a little folder.

“It took me a while to realize that I didn’t have a sense of ‘home’ in the way that a lot of my friends did,” says Window.

She soon became sensitive to the idea of change, and simultaneously curious about what connects people. The title track on Postcard Memories is inspired by the complicated idea of “home,” which takes on an added layer given the increase in displacement and deportation in the U.S. and around the globe.

“We’re living in a time where so many people, here and abroad, are being displaced by violence, greed and forces beyond our control,” she says. Window’s experience showed her that home isn’t necessarily a place, but a feeling: one of ease, safety and the “ability to dream freely.”

And, she adds, home is something that too often people are deprived of.

“If my music can just carry a spark of that feeling of home and safety, that’s my main goal here,” she says. “That’s my job.”

Throughout the album she takes listeners on a sonic journey.

Her track “11:11” has nodes of house music, while “Waste My Time” is in the vein of popular R&B. On the song “Good Job,” she recreates a childhood-like chant with lyrics uplifting the women in her circle, and on the track “Congratulations!” she drops lyrical backhanded compliments to a former toxic lover over an uptempo beat.

“I actually looked around for you because I wanted you to see me / toned from pilates and tanned from Mexico,” Window sings on the track, subsequently revealing she’s since moved on to a new romance. “I met a woman who is good to me,” she sings.

Penned after going through a breakup, a relocation and a shift in perspective, Window says that song, like much of the album, is an ode to the process of healing and finding home, anew.

“It really is internal,” she says, reflecting on the feeling of home. While her music is inspired by external forces — love, friendships, family and nature — it’s really about what goes on inside.

For a lot of us, Window says, we know the feeling of home from a young age; it’s instilled in us through childhood experiences.

“If we’re lucky,” she says, “we can trace ourselves back to it.”

Window performs at the SF Sapphic Pride Block Party on Saturday, Sept. 6 (1300 15th St., San Francisco).