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.
In this episode of The Sunday Music Drop, San Francisco’s Ouida shares her song “Belong With You.”
Ouida says that, growing up in the Bay Area, she’s been influenced by R&B and jazz, in addition to hip-hop, “just gritty, self-affirming language,” she said. Her sound has also been compared to that of artists like Amy Winehouse and Lana Del Rey.
She grew up in a musical household with her sister playing piano, her brother playing viola and her dad singing in their church. “Growing up in San Francisco, you’re just exposed to many genres of music, many different cultures and opportunities to experience music from different places and perspectives,” she said.
When she first started releasing music again in 2020, she was going through her own cultural reckoning with her identity as a person of Filipina and Irish heritage.
“I’m mixed Filipina, so I’m half Irish and half Filipina. And that sense of belonging and not belonging to two separate worlds, was always a point of contention for me … I think I used music growing up as a way to just create a safe space for myself where everything made sense in a way I couldn’t explain,” she said.
She told KQED that her more recent music has been part of a healing experience. The song “Belong With You” is about a long-distance relationship.
“There’s so much unraveling that happens in a long-distance relationship, especially if you come from two different cultures,” she said. Though she and her partner spoke the same language, she said, there are still things that can get lost in translation ”across distance.”
She wrote the song after returning to the Bay Area from visiting her partner. “There is no substitute for unspoken comfort, a sense of reassurance and togetherness that you can’t replicate with a screen,” she said. “If you really want to be with somebody, you just do it … Maybe that’s not true for everybody, but that was true for me.”
She says she hopes that when people listen to “Belong With You,” they have a renewed sense of being OK to be shamefully vulnerable.
“I think it’s OK to just recognize that we’re all a little messy. And it’s important to just acknowledge it and then move on from there,” she said.
“Belong With You” features JyellowL.
Ouida will be performing on Dec. 1, 2022, at 7 p.m. as part of KQED’s Filipinx Arts Night with Balay Kreative. She also has an EP release listening party on Dec. 16, 2022, at 7 p.m. at the CAST building in San Francisco.
Find Ouida on Instagram at sfduchess.