Half Stack: 'Diamond Dancer'

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.

The core members of Half Stack originally met at UC Santa Cruz.

“We’re all banana slugs,” the band’s singer and guitarist, Peter Kegler, says.

But it wasn’t until they moved to the Bay Area that Half Stack was born.

In the eight years since it started to release music, Half Stack recruited many Bay Area musicians to play with the band.

“Half of the Bay Area music scene has played in Half Stack at one point or another,” Kegler says.

Kegler works as a scientist during the day, doing biology research. Making music as a full-time job is “a difficult thing to pull off in the Bay Area,” he says. “Music is not how I make my living, but it’s my life.”

“Diamond Dancer,” one of the tracks off the band’s new LP titled Sitting Pretty, was written during the COVID-19 pandemic while Kegler and his wife were driving around the Northern California coast. “It’s about hitting the road to figure out some stuff during a time of uncertainty,” he says.

It’s one of the band’s more upbeat songs, with an instrumental outro. “It’s a lot of fun every time we play it, because the band can really open up and get into jamming and rocking,” Kegler says.

Half Stack will perform live at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 4, at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco, opening for East Coast country band Florry. For details and tickets, click here.