The Noise Room presented Soft Swells, Elle Belle, and Misty Boyce live at the Hemlock Tavern in San Francisco on Friday, September 1st, 2017. We’d covered and followed these artists over the years and were glad to have them playing one of our favorite venues in the Bay Area. Hemlock Tavern closed in 2018, about a year after this show, when the building was sold for redevelopment; a space carrying the same name has since reopened on the site but has no connection to the original venue or its owners. In the weeks that followed, we featured each artist in more depth with individual interviews. Below is a little about each band, along with some of the music they were playing at the time.
Some careers have a theme. For Soft Swells frontman Tim Williams, that theme was youth. After 2.5 heart surgeries before turning 30, and a daughter born shortly after, he found himself returning to that idea throughout Be Young, the LA indie-pop project’s third full-length album at the time. The songs on Be Young reflected on what it means to be alive, drawing on the life-changing events already behind him and the ones still ahead. We later dug deeper into that story in our interview with Soft Swells.
Elle Belle is the solo project of Christopher Pappas, also known as Elle, a multi-instrumentalist who wrote and recorded his sprawling debut by himself in his apartment. The project began in the spring of 2014, when Pappas moved through a creative breakdown and found his way back by building a new musical identity, an alter ego of sorts. The result was Wako Gumbo, a twenty-song double record blending sixties-inflected psychedelia with garage rock, pop, and prog. We later caught up with Pappas for our interview with Elle Belle.
Misty Boyce has one foot in two worlds: an indie singer-songwriter known for thoughtful, soul-searching takes on love, life, and loss, and a widely respected touring musician who has performed with artists including Sara Bareilles, Joy Williams of the Civil Wars, Ingrid Michaelson, and, at the time, rising electro-pop artist BORNS. We featured her in more depth in our interview with Misty Boyce.
