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.
“This song is about a relationship,” said Yunoka Berry, lead vocalist for the Berkeley-based band Cardboard People.
When band co-founder Jim Greer sent the song’s instrumentals to Berry, she recalled thinking, “‘What is this? It sounds like Cartoon Network.'”
She wrote the song the same day and says things have been going faster and faster since. There’s innuendo in the song, she said, but she also wants people to feel nostalgic. “I want people to feel like an adolescent again,” she said. “I want people to get up, dance around, jump on their bed, clean the kitchen, just have a good old time with this song.”
Berry, who is originally from East Chicago, a city in Indiana, said that when people heard she was moving to California, they thought she meant Los Angeles. Not everyone sees the Bay Area as having a music scene, she said, “but it’s here and it’s thriving and it’s beautiful.”
“You have to work a little bit for it … You kinda have to find it, but when you do, it’s like a magical portal,” Berry said. “It’s like going through the closet and Narnia here.”
She has also never wanted to be put in a box. “The kind of music that I’ve always been interested in making … is not necessarily seen as something Black women do,” she said. Even in college, Berry said she was told to pick a genre. For her, it took some time to find her voice and be confident. “I had to carve out my own lane and do it,” she said.
The band also includes Rhonda Kinard and Genesis Valentine.
Cardboard People will be performing at the Make Out Room in San Francisco on April 8, 2023.
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