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.
Scarlett Levinson and Fauxes bandmates Nick Bielak, Daniel Loor, and Dan March have been playing music together since 2019. The friends met at UC Berkeley in the co-op housing, and sang in choir together.
After that, Levinson said, they “went on this kind of garage rock, shoegazy, psychedelic path,” inspired by the San Francisco and Bay Area underground music scene.
As for their song “Peaches,” she said, that was inspired by … a crush.
“I wrote it because I was annoyed at somebody who I thought was mean to me, who I had a crush on,” said Levinson.
The original instrumentation, Levinson explained, was surfy and grungy until, in rehearsal, they experimented with “shoegaze tones” looping in parts that gave it a more ethereal sound that also shows sassiness.
“It’s kind of got like a bite to it — it’s masochistic,” said Levinson, who added that Fauxes aims to be big and flamboyant. “It really shows the evolution of our sound as a band. … A big goal of ours is creating sounds that are big and kind of overtake whatever you’re doing. Really incredible art … like, commands attention.”