Ty Segall, Among Others

Were Ty Segall to start his entire career over again, he might not do it under the name Ty Segall.

It’s a bit late for that now, well over a decade since he emerged as the princeling of San Francisco’s garage rock revival. Back then, he was a college student in a city vibrating with the heady optimism of Obama’s first term, where you could still rent a house in the Mission with your friends and without being employed by Google. The goal was to be successful, not recognizable. Now, at least within the context of independent music, he is both. It has made him aware of recognition’s discontents, or at least how it can get in the way of being a regular person dealing with people in a regular way. And he is, he claims, a regular person in his mid-30s with a wife and daughter who just so happens to have a double-digit number of albums to his name.