Curt Yagi

Curt Yagi grew up in Fremont and gave his hometown on the profile as Fremont/San Francisco. He played guitar, bass and piano in a string of Bay Area bands before stepping out front with his own songs. The profile filed him under acoustic, folk rock and indie and listed Jason Mraz, Jack Johnson, Ben Harper, Sublime, Barenaked Ladies and Big Head Todd as the reference points; his own bio said the style was hard to pin down but that people could picture waking up to it on a Sunday morning.

The one release listed in 2008 was What's Come Over Me from 2007, and the profile streamed a song called When I Think of You. Later records came out under the name Curt Yagi & The People Standing Behind Me: the nine-song Close My Eyes in March 2011, Need Love in April 2016, and singles including Good Life and Find My Way in 2013 and Bring Back Innocence in 2020. Ben Fong-Torres, the former Rolling Stone editor, said people kept comparing Yagi to other artists but that he simply sounded like himself.

Yagi's own materials cite a 2008 Best of the Bay singer-songwriter nod from the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a RAW San Francisco musician of the year award, and the inclusion of his song Sweep Me on KFOG's Local Scene 8 compilation, the station's annual showcase of Bay Area acts. The profile itself was modest: one member, one vote at a perfect ten, a single shout-out from a listener who liked the mellow sound, and just over a thousand page views by November 2008.

He has kept the band working around the Bay since; Real Options for City Kids, a San Francisco youth nonprofit, posted his 2011 San Francisco Business Times interview.