S.F. to L.A.:
Michael Deni plays his last concert as a local at a sold-out Fillmore.
Musician bids adieu to city in sold-out performance at Fillmore
good San one. Francisco is about to lose another Michael Deni, the musician who records and performs under the moniker Geographer, played his last concert as a local in front of a sold-out crowd at the Fillmore on Saturday, July 28. It was his farewell to fans and the city he’s called home for the past 14 years. “It’s bittersweet,” Deni said, sipping a cup of tea in the venue’s cramped backstage dressing room before the show as band members fluttered around. “It’s the end of an important era in my life.” A few days ago, he broke the news to Geographer’s followers in a long Facebook post: “It’s time for a new adventure, San Francisco. “I’ve been dragging my feet on the move, and to announce it to the world was my way of forcing it to happen,” he said Saturday.
Leaving San Francisco is not a decision Deni takes lightly.
This is the place where he started playing music after a series of deaths in his family back home in New Jersey drove him out West in 2005.
Geographer’s earliest compositions were famously written on a keyboard he found on the street, as Deni diligently worked his way up the ranks, performing at open mike nights at Hotel Utah and bluffing his way into midsize clubs.
“He was in such a vulnerable place at that time,” said Julie Schuchard, who released Geographer’s first 7-inch single, “Kites,” on her label Tricycle Records in 2010. “The songs were his catharsis.”
As Deni fleshed out the dreamy, synth-driven sound of the act in albums such as 2012’s “Myth” and 2015’s “Ghost Modern,” Geographer found his audience. He went on several national tours and performed for capacity crowds at major Northern California music festivals such as Outside Lands, BFD, Noise Pop, First City and Treasure Island.
Deni also became a regular headliner at Bay Area venues, including the Fox Oakland, Independent and the Fillmore.
“When I first moved here, it was so open and loving,” he said of the city. “I wouldn’t have achieved what I achieved here somewhere else.”
But now that Deni is 36, what he describes as a “crossroads age,” he has decided that it’s time to leave.
In August, he will relocate to Los Angeles. He doesn’t have a place yet but hopes to eventually settle in Silver Lake or Echo Park, somewhere he can be around other musicians and creative types.
It’s easy to think that his departure is part of a larger exodus of artists from the Bay Area, and that is partially true.
“San Francisco is a tough place to survive for anyone, especially artists,” Schuchard said. “They just don’t have the same opportunities here as they do other places.”
But for Deni, the move is more of a personal quest.
While he has seen many peers flee San Francisco in the face of rising rents and a diminishing support system for aspiring musicians — from shuttered practice spaces to cost-prohibitive recording studios — he simply feels the need to be closer to the heart of the industry.
“There’s a lot of creative people in Los Angeles who are doing all kinds of things,” he said. “I’ve been going down there for the past two years to write with other people, and I’ve made a lot of friends. When you’re there, things happen.”
At the Fillmore, fans who turned up to see Geographer off are rewarded with an epic, career-spanning set.
With the recent release of the five-song “Alone Time” EP, Deni will no doubt return to a stage in the Bay Area in the near future — in fact, he predicts he will play here more often than ever because he will miss it so much.
The twist is the city will no longer be able to claim him as one of its own.
“My dreams came true here,” Deni said. “Once you achieve your dreams, you have to figure out how to nurture and grow those dreams.”