Moving To San Francisco & Getting Into Music

Bago: “After high school, my parents were like, ‘You gotta go to school.’ So I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to San Francisco.’ I went to school and studied product development. I didn’t really get into music until I was about to move to out of San Francisco and back to LA. I started toying with the idea, just talking about it.

“The music idea started to grow. When I was up there, it was just for fun, something I wanted to do. But you try and find a band and it’s one of the hardest tasks, even if you know a lot of people who make music.

“If they’re really good then they’re already in their own project and they’re fully invested in that. If they’re not, then it’s hard to find the right people. There’s millions of great and amazing musicians but to find one that you vibe out with and the chemistry is there, it’s like you’re trying to create a romance. That’s difficult.

“I had a friend from high school, Johnny, he’s in this little electro duo called The Tenderlions, who introduced me to Alexander Spit. He was playing the drums for Spit’s set and was like, ‘Oh I have this female vocalist, you should meet her. She should play the set with us.’ He would always set me up with these weird things, I would be like, ‘Ugh, John why do you do this?’

“Spit had a show in San Francisco and I met him there. The whole time we both lived there we didn’t know each other but there’d be pictures of us at the same parties, we just didn’t know each other.

“We ended up hanging out in the studio rehearsing and stuff and Spit became my only friend in L.A. once I moved down there. Spit showed me the ropes once I moved back because I didn’t have any friends, I had been living in San Francisco for a minute.

“There was also this kid who was John’s roommate that I actually had met in high school, Jack Rose. When I first moved down here, we would sit in my parent’s garage and make music. That was the first person I wrote with.

“The music was definitely more bluesy, folk. He played the guitar and I was really big, and I’m still big, on voice memos on the phone. Whatever you are, a voice memo is the best way to remember a quick melody. I would send him voice memos or he would just come over, I would start writing, and he would play to whatever I was singing.

“I always sang choir, so knowing music theory but playing it is a totally different thing. Jack would always be like, ‘I don’t understand how you’re writing these things because you don’t know what you’re writing, but you’re writing jazz chords and all this crazy stuff.’

“I had no idea what I was doing, we would just get high in the garage and I would sing and he would just play. That was the first experiment with writing and making music. Then whatever I’d done with Jack or other things I had written, I’d send them to Spit.

“I would be like to Spit, ‘I don’t have a band but can you produce something around this?’ We just kept talking back and forth. He was like, ‘Okay this girl has probably sent me 100 voicemails, I’ll give her a beat.’ It started from there, we started developing a sound. Now we have Sunday’s Best.”