Fauxes: 'Peaches'

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.”

Levinson was a student at Ruth Asawa San Francisco School of the Arts (SOTA), where she said she didn’t enjoy the “rigidity of classical music.” But it was the Berkeley DIY scene, she said, that changed everything.

“There were some really cool bands doing some crazy experimental stuff … and I thought that that was so liberating, so cool. That gave me the courage to kind of be involved in the music scene in general,” she explained. “Go to a DIY show. You will see some of the best music you’ve ever seen and meet some really cool people. It’s a very inspirational community of musicians.”

Fauxes’ Nick Bielak said a big part of his musical journey was inspired by the city he grew up in — a city that he says is now very hard to live in and that artists are being priced out of.

“Whenever you hear about all these great San Francisco bands, when you hear about Jefferson Airplane, you hear about The Grateful Dead, you hear about Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ty Segall … it’s really cool to know that a lot of these artists that I idolize or listen to … were here, and I knew that I wanted to contribute to that scene as well,” said Bielak.

“Peaches” also features Jakob Karstens on the keys. Fauxes will be performing at The Rickshaw Stop in San Francisco on Wednesday, Dec. 20 at 8 p.m. Follow Fauxes on instagram @fauxesband and listen to their music on Bandcamp.