Stephen Steinbrink: 'Poured Back in the Stream'

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.

Oakland-based songwriter and artist Stephen Steinbrink grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, a place he describes as an isolated cultural desert.

“When I was growing up, I would go to all ages spaces in Phoenix, specifically art galleries in the downtown area that you could rent for like a couple hundred bucks a month and people would just organize these bonkers shows that, you know, could only happen then,” they said. “Everything there was kind of happening in a vacuum, no real outside influence culturally and so I think that encouraged a lot of us to just make really strange art.”

This early exposure to “strange” art shows its influence in Steinbrink’s music today, which experiments with pop, folk and drone influences. Their songwriting process usually starts with a Casio drone–Steinbrink tapes some keys down and improvises over the sound.

“I think it just kind of creates sort of a meditative mood that allows melodies to come from wherever they come from,” said Steinbrink. “It definitely feels like a mysterious process to me. The way I understand it, it’s coming from another place; not really from me.”

“Poured Back in the Stream,” off of Steinbrink’s 2023 album Disappearing Coin, showcases this meditative process. A gentle guitar riff accompanies Steinbrink’s melodical lyrics, which he describes as his attempt to write an optimistic song about meaninglessness, based off the Buddhist perspective.

“What if there is no point? And I think that that doesn’t necessarily have to be a really negative outlook. It can be like a beautiful opening into like creating your own meeting and, giving yourself reasons to live, and giving yourself opportunities to love and see beauty and, I mean, that seems like, to me that’s worth staying alive for,” they said.

The keyboard drone that starts and ends the track leaves the listener with the perfect environment to consider these ideas.

“I feel like as a whole, the album is pretty playful and sometimes silly, but this one feels serious to me,” they said. “I’m singing about pretty heavy stuff, and maybe that’s why it feels like the climax to me. But I think as I was writing it, it just felt like a very pure or effective expression of what I was trying to communicate.”

Stephen Steinbrink will be performing at the Great American Music Hall on March 1 as part of San Francisco’s Noise Pop Festival. You can follow him on Instagram @stephensteinbrink, and listen to his music on Spotify and Bandcamp.