The Sunday Music Drop is a weekly radio series hosted by the KQED weekend news team. In each segment, we feature a song from a local musician or band with an upcoming show and hear about what inspires their music.
San Francisco singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Mae Powell says she began writing the song “It Comes in Waves” after a relationship ended. At the time, she was living on a farm with her mother during the pandemic.
“As soon as I figured out the chords, I started singing and like this entire song came out in one sitting, the lyrics exactly the same,” said Powell. “It was just things that had been on my mind and also things that I was directly looking at, like the rain falling down from the sky and the leaves falling to the forest floor.”
She recorded the song around Christmas while vacationing with her mother and a close friend at a hot spring.
“My room in the cabin is kind of like a greenhouse, like glass walls and a tin ceiling,” said Powell. “And I brought my stuff in there and just recorded the song in a day. I played my Casio keyboard and my Gibson [guitar], and then just laid down the harmonies … it was also raining so you can hear the rain in the track because of the tin roof.”
Mae Powell will be performing at Neck of the Woods at 7 p.m. in San Francisco on March 28, 2023.