I remember once, when I was 14, Campbell and I played Beach by San Cisco for my dad. “This is the best song ever,” I said, and Campbell agreed, and my dad was confused, laughing at us. It is important you know that my dad is a Cool Dad, that he was actually the first person to introduce me to Lana Del Rey and Vampire Weekend because he saw them on SNL. But he just didn’t get San Cisco.
To be honest, I don’t know if I truly get San Cisco, if I really understand why they show up in my Spotify top five every year. In many ways they are sonically indistinguishable from the popular indie artists of the mid-2010s. On a playlist filled with Declan McKenna and Cage The Elephant and Hippo Campus, they’d blend in almost too well. And yet I still get chills when I listen to Beach, which seems to be about nothing and everything: being misunderstood, being in love, being at the precipice of adulthood, white-hot bright and full of hope. Its simplicity is captivating: “Paint pictures with your hand / I'll chase you, I'm your biggest fan,” croons Jordi, while Scarlett responds on the chorus, “Who's gonna catch you now? Who's gonna catch you now? / Running so far away, so far away.”
I find Family Trust from San Cisco’s most recent album to be their most emotionally poignant song since Beach. Released 12 years later, Family Trust acts as an updated State of the Union address. Less abstract, but just as evocative. The song is shockingly vulnerable for the band whose popular single from their 2017 album was an ode to the party drug molly.
Who’s gonna catch you now? On Family Trust, San Cisco answers: time will. “I knew that it was / Never gonna be easy / But it shouldn't be this hard,” laments Jordi. The narrator then pushes these emotions down and goes out to purchase a gun, reassuring the listener that it is “only for the range.” I hear echoes of the sentiment expressed in Vampire Weekend’s recurring lyric, “I don’t wanna live like this, but I don’t wanna die.”
Family Trust goes on to ask, desperately, “Tonight, can we pretend I'm what I was?” This is the lyric that keeps me coming back to this song. When I first heard Beach I was just a girl-child, barely out of middle school. I have a bigger body now, inflated from years of birth control and anti-depressants and deciding that it is okay to get drinks with friends once in a while. I have such a hard time accepting this. I cling to this old image of myself. For a night, could I just be her again? Could we all just play along?
Considering this, I see the final verse of Beach a bit differently than I used to: “You'll never come back to me / I read your eulogy.” This lyric is not just applicable to a former lover, but also to our individual pasts, the matryoshka of identities we keep inside of us as we age. Taylor Swift asks on the lakes why all the “elegies” she writes happen to “eulogize” herself. San Cisco begs the same in Family Trust when they attempt to lay to rest their younger selves: “I used to be the life of the party / Yeah, I was walking on a dream / Now I live on my own / In a unit my family owns… This isn't what they promised me.” The mourning is visceral, bitter. It is so hard to make peace with the fact that you cannot resurrect the past, even if you can still feel it, ever-present, if you can see its outline in your shadow.
When I was 20, I saw San Cisco live at Black Cat in Washington, D.C. In my memory, they played Beach last, but after looking up their set-lists, I see this couldn’t have been true, that they always play it in the beginning of their sets, if at all. Right up front, like a thesis statement. San Cisco was supposed to come back to D.C. in March, but they cancelled their U.S. tour. And so when the weekend rolls around that I had been supposed to see them perform, I put my headphones on, I play Beach, and for a moment, I feel something shift inside me, like the rattle of a nesting doll.