Tanukichan: 'Been Here Before'

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.

Tanukichan is the indie rock project of San Francisco-raised and Oakland-based Hannah van Loon. Van Loon was inspired by the mythology of the tanuki, or the Japanese raccoon dog, a creature said to have shape-shifting abilities and a hedonistic love of drinking and partying.

“I felt like I was trying to do this music thing, and there’s a lot of me that felt super shy and scared, but I just had to go for it,” she explains. “I was always sort of a tomboy, so it just felt good to, like, claim that a little bit.”

Growing up as a classical musician studying piano and violin, van Loon took a liking to making music and using it as an outlet to help her to get through the low points of life. Her song “Been Here Before” ruminates on these inevitable low points, and how sometimes there isn’t much you can do besides hold on until they pass.

Her Bay Area upbringing also plays a role in her unique sound.

“Driving around in the Bay, I listen to the radio a lot. And there’s a lot of ’90s hip-hop and R & B and stuff on. I just really love that stuff and I think it was also fun to kind of try to draw from that, like just the beats or melodies,” she says. “A couple of nights ago we had a show and there was someone in the audience who was like, ‘Yo, this is so Oakland. This is so the East Bay.’ I was like, cool. There’s something in there.”

She also credits the Bay Area’s abundance of artists for influencing her artistry. One notable Bay Area collaborator is Chaz Bear of Toro y Moi, whom van Loon met through a mutual friend while she was studying music at UC Berkeley. The two quickly hit it off, with Bear producing Tanukichan’s EP and albums, including her latest release, Gizmo.

Tanukichan’s musical-production process usually begins with van Loon sketching out a beat and structure and writing out the lyrics and melody, then working with Bear to fill in the rest. Gizmo is named after van Loon’s late dog, whom she adopted during the pandemic.

Tanukichan will be performing at Bottom of the Hill in San Francisco on Friday, May 19, 2023.