Oakland singer-songwriter Chance Rein is charting his own way, but Jewish music is something he still finds “inspiring.”
That’s what he shared with J. after performing his set of deeply personal songs for an intimate crowd at Brick & Mortar Music Hall in San Francisco on July 10.
Rein, 23, on guitar, played music from his April debut album “places to disappear,” a gentle, sometimes somber collection of soft-rock, folk-country songs that touch on his personal growth and queer identity, and which spring from his own upbringing.
Rein grew up as Chance Reiniesch in a small town in southern Illinois, where music was a way for him to find community. He started with choir, then turned to songwriting.
“I grew up in a super rural place, and my community being involved in music in my small town was really important to me,” he said. “But also it was difficult to be gay there, and it was difficult to grow up as a gay man there. And I think songwriting is actually what really helped me deal with that.”
His Judaism is part of his life and also influences his music, he said. He celebrates Shabbat and his tattoos include an olive branch and a hamsa, the hand-shaped symbol of protection used across the Middle East.
“I love to daven,” said Rein, who prays regularly with Berkeley-based Minyan Dafna. “And I think that’s a kind of music that feels really personal, and it feels like something that I feel really, really blessed to experience.”
In the crowd at Brick & Mortar was Charlie Garcia-Spiegel, who previously heard Rein perform during a Pride Shabbat hosted by Nice Jewish Boys+, a local group for queer and transgender Jewish men. Garcia-Spiegel told J. that he wanted to hear Rein sing again and described the performance as “mesmerizing, engaging, beautiful, connecting [and] really fun.”
Rein’s songs are how he makes sense of the world, but he also hopes that his music can help bring people together in times that he said are challenging for both the Jewish community and the whole country.
“It’s a really turbulent time to be a human alive on the planet Earth,” he said. “And so I think the more spaces that we have that can bring people together, that can create feelings of joy and love and hope and peace, I think that’s really important right now.”