Subscribe to The Bay Bridged Podcast!

This month’s Artist Spotlight podcast — the latest in our series featuring live-in-the-studio performances and interviews with emerging Bay Area performers — showcases the supremely talented Al Lover. You can frequently catch Al DJing at rock shows around San Francisco, but he’s also an accomplished songwriter. Coming from a background as a rapper and producer, Al Lover makes “beats,” his shorthand for the dense genre-mashing tracks he composes using psych and garage samples.

In this episode, we chat with Al about how he finds the samples for his tracks, and he performs two songs live on his sampler, including “Vodun Moon” and a new song with the working title of “Spinach.” It’s a great conversation with an artist uniquely positioned to offer thoughts on the Bay Area music scene; after all, he’s been sampling and remixing SF bands for years.

Finally, you can catch Al Lover performing at Push the Feeling on March 1 and at The New Parish on March 5.