Marika Christine: 'Buckle Up Baby'

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.

Singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Marika Christine has been in bands in San Francisco for eight years. She started out with musical theater as a child, which led to her pursuing classical voice in high school at School of the Arts.

As a teenager, Christine began writing her own songs. Her solo project started during the pandemic, and has since grown into performing shows and working with her full band. Soft Like an Apricot is her second full-length album, following Puzzle World in 2021. She’s releasing her second album through a Seattle-based record label called Ghost Mountain Records, and it’s available on vinyl from Bandcamp.

She considers her genre “singer-songwriter meets psychedelic rock” and also identifies with indie rock, folk rock or freak folk. Christine said that her song “Buckle Up Baby” has its roots in 1970s songwriting.

“It’s kind of about processing a big change and trying to move physically forward, but having a hard time mentally catching up with the new direction you’re going,” she said.

Christine wrote the song after moving out of an apartment that she shared with her last partner and having feelings of sadness, but also the “comfort or excitement that change brings.” She hopes that people will interpret the song in their own way and feel how it relates to their own lives and the changes they’re going through.

“When I write a song, it feels really fresh for like six months. And then getting the band involved, it kind of takes on new life and morphs, and then recording kind of revitalizes it,” said Christine. “Performing and playing your songs live is so fun and is a really great experience, because you can kind of take the song that I wrote two years ago or five years ago, but then it can have new meaning for a specific moment in life.”

Her band includes Maria Donjacour (Medscool) on bass and vocals, Adam Wilson on keys and synthesizers, Fabrizio Incerti on drums and Janis Stuurman on the trumpet.

Marika Christine will be performing live at BFF.fm studios in San Francisco on Tuesday, June 20, at 7 p.m.