February 26 2003

By Jimmy Draper

'THERE USED TO be a pop scene in San Francisco that was really strong, but it's kind of fallen apart," Amy Linton says over tea one afternoon at her day job at a Potrero Hill architecture firm. With the same endearingly drowsy delivery that defines her singing style, the 30-year-old singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist of the Aislers Set is discussing how her band's place in the city has changed since they surfaced in 1997.

"It's kind of good that happened, though, because that scene was so incubated that it almost alienated other people," she continues. "We obviously love all these other bands here, and now playing with [acts] like Erase Errata and Tussle is more fun than just playing with other pop bands. It's exciting."

Linton's desire to more fully immerse her band – which includes Track Star's Wyatt Cusick, Poundsign's Alicia VandenHeuvel, and Scenic Vermont's Yoshi Nakamoto – in the city's musical landscape shouldn't surprise fans of 1998's Terrible Things Happen and 2000's The Last Match. On those albums, Linton uses San Francisco to frame her vaguely retro-pop portraits of people, including herself, in various states of emotional and romantic unrest. And while the romanticization of the city has long fueled bands' California dreaming, the Aislers Set depict a place that's rooted more in the realities of humdrum day-to-day living than in everything S.F. is supposed to represent.

Site specific

The difference is in the details. Linton has a knack for capturing the importance of life's minutiae, and by incorporating specific places (the Mint and Army, now Cesar Chavez, Street, among others) and friendly faces (pals show up in songs and titles) the Aislers Set's personal, personable songs possess a real-life poignancy not often found in pop music's lexicon. It's an intimate, write-what-you-know approach, a look at the small, seemingly mundane slices of life that color our existences in ways most big-picture songs don't acknowledge. In this way the album does more than simply describe this city – it offers a warts-and-all glimpse into a life here.

Which is why the promises, both kept and broken, of this city and its inhabitants echo so vividly across the Aislers Set's albums, and why their San Francisco isn't the picture-perfect refuge from an unfeeling real world that it's so often portrayed to be in songs and movies. "Stop your daydreaming about such silly little things," Linton warns on Terrible Things Happen, " 'cause California lies." Still, by accepting all of S.F.'s flaws, Linton paints a picture of a place so vibrantly complex it only makes sense she'd find inspiration for her band in even the non-pop nooks and crannies of this city's underground.

As far as local pop lore goes, Linton's long been known for originally making Terrible Things Happen single-handedly on her eight-track. And while the band rerecorded many of her girl-in-the-garage songs for that release and The Last Match, several tracks still feature Linton performing all instrumental, vocal, and recording duties. It's a tactic that's led many to assume Linton is the Aislers Set. "It's just that I have all this stuff at my disposal and I want to get it done, so I start recording," she says with a shrug, dismissing the idea. "Usually when I start something, I just have to do it till it's finished. One problem with that is that often [bandmates] aren't around to help me record."

Working together

Though built from that same blueprint, the Aislers Set's stunning new album, How I Learned to Write Backwards (Suicide Squeeze/Slumberland), is the group's most collaborative effort. Linton may have written several of the songs' skeletons, with everyone fleshing them out later, but other numbers were full-on team efforts. After recording began last February, however, everything was put on hold when Linton started suffering from an undiagnosed illness that left her unable to walk. Once she recovered, the band toured with their way-fey pop peers Belle and Sebastian in May before resuming work on Backwards. The time lapse, Linton says, resulted in their most stylistically diverse album yet.

"After I got sick, I went back to those first recordings, and I didn't really like some of the stuff," she says, explaining her decision to scrap some of the original songs in favor of new material. "Which is probably why [Backwards] is so eclectic, but I didn't really plan on it being that way. I paid more attention to each song rather than worrying, like I did on the first record, about how they were going to sound together."

Still, Backwards coheres because the Aislers Set always use pop as their stylistic springboard: even their most uncharacteristic moments, like "The Train #2" 's punky fuzzbox bop and the acoustic confessional "Unfinished Paintings," aren't all that far from their more recognizably shimmering Shangri-la la la. It's a dreamy blend of girl-pop prettiness, jagged guitar jangle, and harmonic heartbreak that, like its near perfect predecessors, would make Phil Spector misty-eyed with pride – even if he's behind bars when he hears it.

Not surprisingly, Linton also continues her exploration of San Francisco life. Neighborhood shout-outs like "Mission Bells" and "Attraction Action Reaction" are some of the band's swoon-worthiest songs yet, with Backwards truly resonating when her friends enter the picture. "Sara's on the roof to watch the sky, the queers and the boys and girls," she sings on "Through the Swells," a wistfully poetic ode to Capp Street, "where all the perverts and shy Mission belles converge."

It's this appreciation for everything the city has to offer that makes the Aislers Set so unique. While many musicians pen pretentious manifestos about ways to live and love, Linton prefers simply to report what she experiences. Hers is a pop philosophy that, by prioritizing personal involvement over detached observation, comes off as more inviting than the so-called universal appeal of most songs on the radio. And so, as with discovering all of the quirky intricacies of a new city, it's easy to get lost inside the Aislers Set's S.F., to immerse yourself in all of the stories and spaces that Linton found here.

"I was in the city and meeting all these people, and I got attached to certain places," she says, smiling as she recounts her inspiration for Backwards. "These songs are all pretty much for my friends."