The story of how Geographer got started goes something like this: Out on a Golden Gate Park run one evening, Michael Deni found a toy synthesizer leaning on a light pole not too far from his apartment on Masonic and Central — he thinks. (It’s been a while since he knew all the names of San Francisco’s streets off the top of his head, Deni admits.)
“I’m coming back and it's dark and I'm really cold, because I also didn't understand that California got cold, and I just see this synthesizer,” Deni told Gazetteer SF, recalling the story while driving to band practice.
Deni — having freshly moved to the city in the mid-2000s after living as an East Coast small-town boy (his words) his entire life — took the toy instrument home and wrote a handful of songs on it. He named this wistful, bookish indie pop project Geographer. At least one of those songs would make it onto the first EP, titled Innocent Ghosts, which attracted buzz from the likes of Spin and KQED and culminated in Geographer signing to San Francisco indie label Tricycle Records. Come 2010, Geographer released Animal Shapes, a six-song suite that is arguably its crown jewel. It’s a quintessential indie success story, with the sort of recognition that felt possible for musicians in the post-MySpace, pre-streaming era.
To commemorate Animal Shapes’ 15th anniversary, Deni is touring the EP nationwide, with his first stop in San Francisco this Friday as part of Noise Pop. He’s spent the past few weeks rehearsing with a new band and reconnecting with these familiar songs. Getting to perform Animal Shapes in the city where he made it, without any of the baggage or nerves that comes with being a young artist in the hype-machine ringer, is the best kind of homecoming.
“It’s kind of fun to go back and just celebrate this beautiful time in my life that was just so light with feeling and creativity,” Deni said.
For Deni, San Francisco’s music scene was freeing. Every week or so, he’d write a song and take it to Hotel Utah’s open-mic night, beta-testing each one to see what would stick with the eclectic crowd. It loosened him up for touring and performing his songs elsewhere. But, mostly, it was a thrill to be a part of a mass of people who were onstage — performing for applause, sure, but performing for the sake of performing, like one ponytailed guy who, week after week, would perform the national anthem on violin.
“They were really bizarre characters and it was so fun,” he exclaimed, “to rub elbows with them and just be like, ‘Wow, this guy's out there.’ The freedom that they felt … That, to me, is really what was so cool about San Francisco at that time.”
San Francisco was going through a musical renaissance. The recession-era years were a bit of a boom time for the city's alternative music scene — between garage-rock lifers like Thee Oh Sees (now, simply, Osees) and Ty Segall, the sweet and melancholy retro-pop of Girls and The Morning Benders, and countless other acts, a groundswell of vital talent had ascended into the indie mainstream. Deni drew inspiration from jangle-pop four-piece The Botticellis and experimental trio Religious Girls, cult-favorite local acts that feel indicative of the city’s musical breadth.
“It was just such a nice place to be,” he said of the Bay Area’s music scene. “It was like a perfect little world I wish I could have stayed in forever.”
The songs off Animal Shapes build and layer — a synth line here, an extended cello break there — until they crest into a groove or grandiose breakdown, elegant bedroom pop bursting out of its bedroom walls. As a teenage listener diving headfirst into left-of-center music, it was infectious. “Kites” and “Verona” were played on repeat on my beat-up iPod Classic and put onto mix CDs for friends. Geographer was a part of a wave of easy-to-love, electronic-y indie pop-rock that made it on rotation at Urban Outfitters or got play on Hype Machine, and countless blogs and Tumblr pages.
There’s pressure in being a buzzy band to sustain momentum and keep the hype going. It was overwhelming for Deni. As much of a breakout as Geographer’s music had, there was a nagging feeling for more.
“It was strange to see bands that sounded a lot like my band getting opportunities that I wasn't getting,” he said. “But, I don't know, I feel like even those bands probably felt that about other bands as well. That was another tough thing about being in the band. You're always looking upward.”
Deni admits that it was tough. He felt stuck in an “imbroglio of intensity and ego.” Even when Geographer was doing big things — headlining shows and playing Outside Lands, steady public radio and MTV placements — he didn’t feel very present for all of it.
“I just was a mess,” he said of himself at that time. “I was just so uncentered.”
With time and experience, he settled in. Geographer moved from buzzy band to an established, still-very-much-loved one, making more music, garnering new fans, and packing local venues like The Fillmore and the Fox Theater. A handful of albums and EPs that followed broadened the band’s palette while still retaining the tender core of its earliest work. But with San Francisco’s rising rent, his closest friends moving on and away from the city, and an interest in working with new collaborators, Deni, following a fair chunk of the Bay’s indie rock talent, moved to L.A. in 2018.
That proximity to the music industry — and a fair bit of hindsight — has helped Deni feel more certain about what he wants out of this stage of his career: to make “heartfelt artistic music that I love.”
“Now that I live in Los Angeles, and I’ve been through everything, I’m just like, ‘I never should have even tried to make this music a part of a larger economic machine,’” he said.
San Francisco provided a space for him to feel it all out in a community that wholeheartedly embraced him; Deni means it when he utters the cliche that he left his heart here. But with that distance, he feels ready to be present this time around.
“I can't believe I'm still allowed to do this after all these years,” he said. “That’s the ultimate dream.”
Geographer is playing at August Hall Friday as part of this year's Noise Pop Festival. Get tickets here.
