Sarah McKenzie's Love Letter to San Francisco

City By the Bay is Sarah McKenzie’s love letter to San Francisco. The song was originally written as part of a composition commission that McKenzie had received from the Diablo Regional Arts Association in 2018 and was premiered live during a concert with the title ’San Francisco - Paris of the West’ at the Lesher Center in Walnut Creek, CA in the same year. Right afterwards McKenzie and her musicians recorded the entire program at legendary Capitol Studios in Hollywood. ‘I had already recorded other albums that were scheduled for release, which is why this recording was shelved at the time and I always thought it needed a special occasion for me to release it. That moment is now.’

Living in San Francisco for the past year, City By the Bay has taken on an even deeper meaning for McKenzie. Residing in the heart of the Civic Center, she experienced the city in a raw and unfiltered way—navigating daily life with her two-year-old son while pregnant with her second child. From this vantage point, she encountered a striking contrast at the core of San Francisco: immense wealth and technological innovation existing alongside visible homelessness, addiction, and staggering inequality. Simple routines, like walking to neighborhood playgrounds, became encounters with a city under strain—security guards at playgrounds, locked shelves at the local stores, open drug activity in the streets, and, most starkly, a drug-related murder near the San Francisco Public Library she frequented.

Yet within this complexity, McKenzie discovered the enduring heart and soul of San Francisco. In Hayes Valley, inspired by Harvey Milk’s belief that “the American dream is found in the neighborhoods,” she found a vibrant and deeply connected community. Surrounded by families, caregivers, and neighbors - a divers community from across the world - meaningful friendships formed across cultures and social backgrounds. Beneath the Victorian and Edwardian architecture, colorful façades, grand bay windows, and Italianate streets of Hayes Valley, McKenzie fell deeply in love with the city and felt its soul. For this reason, City By the Bay now carries new emotional weight; it is sung with greater depth, shaped by a year in which she found her own American dream within the neighborhoods of San Francisco.

Release date: January 23, 2026 (Label: Normandy Lane Music / Publisher: Universal Music Publishing)