Although this event is free and open to the public, you can become a SF Parks Alliance member to secure reserved seating here, and RSVP for a chance to win prizes and reserved seating here!

If you’re a current SF Parks Alliance member and don’t have a member code, please email membership@sfparksalliance.org for discounted reserved seating.

About Due South

Due South is a free concert series made possible by the City of San Francisco, District 11 Supervisor Ahsha Safai, and SF Parks Alliance. The concerts will be held at the Jerry Garcia Amphitheater in San Francisco’s McLaren Park on July 29th, August 26th, September 16th and October 7th from 2-6pm each day. The series will feature a diverse lineup of contemporary talent that reflects the local neighborhoods and populations of the City’s Southern districts neighboring the park.

Accessibility Information

Accommodation Requests:

Please email events@sfparksalliance.org (415-906-6234) to reserve accessible seating at the show. Please note that submitting your request at least 72 hours before the event will help ensure availability.

Shuttle Information:

There will be a shuttle service from 1:30pm – 6:30pm that will pick up riders on John F Shelley Dr. in between Cambridge St. and Mansell St. (see map linked here) to shuttle attendees to the amphitheater.

Parking Information:

Limited parking spots for people with disabilities will be available on John F Shelley Dr as well as in the main amphitheater parking lot.

Seating Information:

Accessible seating will be available upon reservations made through events@sfparksalliance.org. Accessible seating will be on the ground level of the amphitheater with appropriate signage indicating they are reserved for accessible seating. On-site staff will be monitoring the passenger loading zone, accessible seating area, as well as check-in.

Public Transportation Information:

MUNI Bus 29 stops on Mansell St & John F Shelley Drive inside McLaren Park.

MUNI Bus 52 stops on Dublin St. and La Grande Ave just outside McLaren Park.

Cherry Glazerr

It’s been four years since Cherry Glazerr released their resplendent third album Stuffed and Ready, but Clementine Creevy has been in no rush. “I’ve spent these years taking a hard look at myself, at my relationships, and writing about it,” she says. “I guess I’m coming to terms with a lot of my bullshit.” Cherry Glazerr has been on the road more often than not since Creevy was still in high school, and when the pandemic hit, she immersed herself in a static existence she’d been deprived of. “When you’re always leaving, you don’t have a great sense of where your relationships stand, romantic or otherwise. You’re not thinking about the work that goes into maintaining them,” she says.

Creevy describes Cherry Glazerr’s ambitious new album, I Don’t Want You Anymore, as some of her most personal, raw music to date, a collection of songs that elaborate on this period of self-reckoning. It’s the first she’s produced since Cherry Glazerr’s garage rock debut, Haxel Princess, released nearly a decade ago when Creevy was a teenager. That album made Cherry Glazerr a Los Angeles mainstay act, and its follow up, 2017’s Apocalipstick, put the band on the national map. Cherry Glazerr’s rough and tumble sound coupled with Creevy’s witty, sarcastic, occasionally self-deprecating lyricism made the band a joy to watch live, their energy unmatched by the coolly detached bent of indie rock at the time.

Creevy describes I Don’t Want You Anymore as a “mature” album, moreso in reference to her personal growth than a reflection of the record, which in true Cherry Glazerr fashion is best described as Extremely Fun. To make it, Creevy linked up with producer Yves Rothman, who’s best known for his work with Yves Tumor. “I knew I had to work with him,” she says. The collaboration began with a cover of Metallica’s “My Friend of Misery” and grew into this new record, which Creevy considers to be Cherry Glazerr, fully-actualized. “The songs on this one are songs I’ve dreamed of making,” she says.

Lead single “Soft Like a Flower” exemplifies that growth. A murky guitar riff inaugurates the track, before Creevy’s unguarded vocals enter the mix. She sings of a consuming obsession and is joined on the chorus by longtime bandmate Sami Perez. “I’m high on your something,” they wail. “I like you killing me/ I like you killing me/ I like you killing me.” It’s proudly emotive, what Creevy calls an “Evanescence moment.” “It’s a real ‘losing your fucking shit’ kind’ve vibe,” she says. “I wanted this album to be just heart and soul. Completely exposed.”

I Don’t Want You Anymore uses the element of surprise to its advantage; each track is a radical reimagination of what Cherry Glazerr is and can be. “Bad Habit” opens with a spiraling vocal loop that Creevy began recording at home and it expands into a delirious downtempo dance track without ever invoking a guitar. “I can’t wait to play that one live. Whenever I’m free of a guitar and I can just sing… I love having those moments on tour,” she says. The subsequent track, “Ready for You” is sung in funky staccato and the initially spare bassline on the opening verse is eventually overtaken by a massive, staticky guitar riff that reminds you this is, at its heart, a rock album. “At the start of the pandemic, I was writing a lot in the box, what I call ‘computer music’ since I’m technologically challenged,” Creevy says. “It was fun to experiment, but after a while, I just really missed rock. I love rock music – I love how it’s cathartic and brash and sometimes a little dumb.”

Though Cherry Glazerr’s latest offers some insight into Creevy’s private moments, it’s also a humorous album, one she hopes people don’t take too seriously. “This was a really therapeutic record to make, but it’s also self-aware, and I hope, funny,” she says. On “Touched You With My Chaos,” the album’s outright loudest song that begs for a scream-along, Creevy becomes a wildly dramatic narrator, one who slashes the tires of her own car, accompanied by strings and the unexpected squawk of a trumpet. She wrote it after watching Gregg Araki’s Mysterious Skin, and wanted to mimic the sense of desperation the film inspires. “I said that I loved you!” she howls over and over again on the chorus.

Movies have always played a role in Creevy’s songwriting, and many of the songs on I Don’t Want You Anymore can be described visually. When she wrote “Sugar,” Creevy pictured playing it in a dark, seedy club, her deadpan vocal delivery mirroring the grim atmosphere. “That song tickles the part of my brain that loves driving really late at night,” she says. These are songs to soundtrack the listener’s life, a score to suit any occasion. The titular track makes a promise to an unnamed other, but the repeating lyrics on the bridge could just as easily serve as a love letter to listeners: “In the end, you’re always holding me.”

Momma

Following Momma’s beloved 2020 LP Two of Me, which introduced the world to the symbiotic writing style and profound creative intuition of founders Etta Friedman and Allegra Weingarten, the band’s third studio album Household Name reveals an exciting new chapter marked by both personal and artistic growth. Now based in Brooklyn, New York, after relocating from hometown Los Angeles, the duo upgraded from GarageBand and took their time writing and recording in a proper studio alongside multi-instrumentalist/producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch and drummer Zach CapittiFenton. The resulting album, mastered by Grammy-winning engineer Emily Lazar, is a tightly-stitched collection that is magnetic and dynamic, and also marks their debut for Polyvinyl Record Co./Lucky Number—who signed Momma in the midst of the pandemic before the band members had even finished college. In chasing their idols and embracing personal storytelling, the band has skillfully carved out their own path. Household Name showcases an unfettered vulnerability elevated by serious alt-rock bombast, and is an album that tells the world: This is Momma.

Across the 12 songs, Weingarten and Friedman, who met and formed Momma in high school, cull lyrical inspiration from their own lives for the first time–a contrast with the conceptual fiction of Two of Me. “I went through a lot of changes as we were writing and demoing this record. The biggest was that I was going through a really messy breakup, which was motivation to make this record the best it could be. I really felt like I had something to prove,” Weingarten says. “I wanted to write about heartbreak, which isn’t something we normally focus on in our lyrics. Etta and I ended up writing several songs on our own because we were having two really different experiences during this time. It’s the first record where we each have three songs that we sing solo on.” Friedman adds, “After making Two of Me, I think this album couldn’t help but to get personal. This was the first time all of us worked together throughout the entire process of demoing, recording, etc. We’ve never had the luxury to work this intimately together for such a prolonged amount of time.”

Bygone heroes also helped inspire a lyrical theme throughout Household Name: the rise and fall of the rock star, and the tropes and tribulations that come with that arc. The theme allowed the group to celebrate (and, in some cases, directly reference) icons like Nirvana, Pavement, Smashing Pumpkins, Veruca Salt, and the Breeders’ Kim Deal, while weaving in their own perspective and experiences. “It became a little game like, ‘Oh this is the ‘Cannonball’ moment or the ‘Drain You’ moment,’” Weingarten recalls of the writing process. “Having that, because we’re all nerds, gave us motivation to keep writing different kinds of songs, and also created focus so that we’re not just presenting scattered ideas. Our guitar chords aren’t classic grunge chords; as Momma, we have our own style.”

“Lucky,” one of the album’s standouts, was written when Friedman was across the country from their partner, and draws inspiration from Liz Phair’s “Nashville.” “She so perfectly put into words how mundane life can feel the most blissful when the person you love is around,” Friedman remembers. “I think harping on that thought, and missing my partner so much, is what helped write ‘Lucky.’ I can be lazy, boring, brushing my teeth, naked, half awake, and still get butterflies from them. I just felt like a real winner to be in love with my best friend.” Meanwhile, “Motorbike,” sung by Weingarten, expresses a different, illusionary side of young love. “I was hung up on this guy who I thought was super cool,” Weingarten recalls. “The song ended up being purely fantasy – I was writing about all of these scenarios that didn’t actually happen, because this guy really wasn’t giving me the time of day. But it all felt real in my head – once you write out the lyrics, rewrite them, demo, and redemo a song, you forget that these weren’t real experiences. It becomes a part of you.”

Although Household Name was mostly inspired by the musicians’ own lives, much of the album embraces a satiric sensibility with its tongue-in-cheek rock culture references. “No Stage” is told from the point-of-view of a jaded rock star who desperately wants to make it big (“If I’m famous for the night / I’ll be lonely all my life”), and the triumphant highlight “Rockstar” is about a reverent fascination with Tenacious D’s over-the-top, comedic preoccupation with being ‘The Best Rock Band of All Time.’ Co-written with producer Kobayashi Ritch (whose indelible guitar riff demos served as the song’s foundation), “Speeding 72″ details a fast burning romance between two kids who meet at a show and then go for a ride, referencing Pavement’s “Gold Soundz” with nostalgic admiration.

After collaborating on every aspect of the songs—from writing to arrangements—Momma recorded Household Name at Studio G in Brooklyn and Kobayashi Ritch’s home studio in Los Angeles. Kobayashi Ritch took on the roles of producer and mixer—like Flood on Smashing Pumpkins’ seminal Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness—aiming to embrace all the band’s ‘90s influences while also bringing the sonics forward with a contemporary freshness. “Artists like Nirvana and Liz Phair were obviously huge influences for this record, particularly in the songwriting, but I drew just as much inspiration from artists like Frou Frou, Linkin Park, Pinback, and Garbage. That era of popular music was really inspiring to me because those artists celebrated the production instead of hiding it away, and it made the music feel energetic and daring,” he explains. “I wanted to bring that mentality to Momma, and make this album feel intentional and complete. I also wanted to make sure we weren’t just making a throwback record. While our influences are definitely noticeable, I think the different sounds and vibes and songwriting help it read as something new and exciting that only Momma could make.”

Household Name perfects a balance of heavy riffs, deep emotions, inviting sonic production, and a lighthearted, wry sense of humor, creating a singular lane for Momma in today’s world of alt rock. The album introduces a thrilling new era of the band to not only listeners, but also to the members themselves. “There have been so many times where I have begun to write words to a tune, just out of pure emotion from something I experienced, and I don’t actually realize how I feel about the situation until I listen back to the lyrics after a few days,” Friedman notes. “So, when an artist gets personal in their music, it seems to me that the listeners and the artist are having the same experience at once, which is a better understanding of the writer as a whole. That’s what I want these songs to give to the listener: a true introduction to all sides of Momma.”

King Isis

Born and raised in the cultural hub of Oakland, CA, King Isis shifts shapes and fuses sounds ranging from rock and R&B to jazz and blues, sweeping through pain, growth, and transformation.

Music has been in King Isis’ blood for generations. They were taught on the piano of their great-great-grandmother Omega King, one of the first Black opera singers in Chicago. King Isis’ artist moniker pays reverence to Omega’s legacy of pursuing her passion of art and creation in segregated, post-slavery America. “Her name holds a lot of power in my house and in my family,” Isis reflects, “A big part of the reason my artist name incorporates hers is to remind me that there is power in my voice, that music has always been a deep-rooted part of me, and to keep going.”

Growing up, Isis existed on the periphery: coming from a low-income, single mother household, they struggled with feelings of inferiority and insecurity in predominantly white, wealthy private schools. Isis turned to creating little worlds of her own through music and writing.

Stifled by years of stringent classic training, they began to explore a more improvisational and experimental approach. EP title scales is a further window into these multiplicities as well as a more literal nod to musical theory – the name also calls to mind creatures both real and mythologised, and the concept of balance between dual forces. This sense of duality is also entwined with the EP’s central motif, which centralizes largely around the concept of shadow work – embracing both introspective light and dark, and “stepping within and into discomfort to find acceptance and create the whole and finding freedom within all parts of you.”

Emboldened by the strength of the maternal figures in her lineage and life, King Isis has always had an affinity for rulebreakers, gravitating towards the kinds of people who go beyond themselves to set the template for change. Sonically, they credit everyone from SOPHIE to Erykah Badu and Tyler The Creator, whilst personally they look towards feminist progressives like Assata Shakur, Angela Davis, Gloria Anzaldua. The communal healing power of music is a pillar of King Isis’ ethos. They volunteer teaching music classes for low-income communities in Los Angeles, and worked with the FreeStudio Program of Rikers Island, creating a safe creative space for incarcerated youth and the children of incarcerated adults. King Isis finds power and freedom in sound and is a firm believer in creativity as fuel to the revolution.