Preschool: 'Soft Spaces'

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.

Vocalist and drummer Ava Lynch describes the band Preschool as “an amalgam of surf, art rock, and garage rock.” The San Francisco-based trio also includes Nikki Yaffe and Corbin Nutini. They met in high school at an after-school music program called the San Francisco Rock Project.

“It’s located in the heart of downtown, right on Harrison. And it really cultivated in us our crucial adolescent phase," Lynch said. After a while, she says playing covers became old: "For us we just wanted to gravitate to writing original songs,” she said.

Preschool’s songwriting process begins with Lynch and Yaffe; Lynch describes both herself and Yaffe as sensitive people who enjoy poetry and creative writing. The trio then work together to lay out the melodies and rhythmic qualities.

“I like creating this duality of feeling really emotional, but tying that into very rock-heavy, garage-rock feelings and sounds,” Lynch said.

The song "Soft Spaces" was written by Yaffe, who was inspired by the idea of places of comfort.

The idea of these places hit home for the band members, whose practice space was destroyed in a devastating fire last December. Lynch’s father's screen printing business, Babylon Burning, was home not only to the band’s practice space and the business, but also DIY shows Preschool hosted with peers from school and the San Francisco music scene.

“We would put together fashion runways, gallery exhibits, benefit shows, and we were inviting our friends who are all musicians, all artists themselves, to come and collaborate," Lynch said. "There is like this beautiful merge of community-centered spaces and arts and music that I think is really alive and well in San Francisco still — in the Bay Area, actually, as a whole.”

Lynch speaks highly of the music and arts community in the Bay Area, which she credits for helping raise money to find a new space for Babylon Burning, and for providing them with temporary practice space back at the San Francisco Rock Project, where the band members all met.

"Being from such a diverse city full of cultures, backgrounds and identities, it definitely has an influence," she said. "Cultural joy can be reflected in so many different forms of art. But I see it specifically when community is brought together in a safe space where people are free to be themselves."

Lynch says being true to yourself and respectful of others should be on everybody's radar. "Celebrating those aspects I think are really crucial to what we can do to further ourselves as Bay Area people in the arts in general,” she said.

Preschool will be performing at the Ivy Room in Albany on Monday, March 13, 2023.