Sean Hayes comes back to The Independent

The Bay Area's soul-folk songwriter, two decades a San Franciscan, plays Divisadero on Saturday, Nov. 14.

There are San Francisco musicians you see once and those you keep seeing, year after year, in the same handful of rooms. Sean Hayes is firmly the second kind, and next Saturday he is back on Divisadero.

Sean Hayes plays The Independent on Saturday, Nov. 14, 2026, at 9 p.m. Tickets are $36.05 through TicketWeb, linked on this page. The Independent, at 628 Divisadero, holds about 500, which is about the right size for him: big enough to feel like an event, small enough that the quiet songs still land.

Hayes was born in New York City and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, but his career is a Bay Area story. He spent roughly two decades in San Francisco before moving north to Sonoma County, and in our records he plays San Francisco more than any other market: 33 shows. Wherever his mailbox is now, this is still a home game.

The music sits where folk, soul and roots rock overlap, and he has been building that catalog since the late '90s: *A Thousand Tiny Pieces* in 1999, then *Lunar Lust*, *Alabama Chicken*, *Big Black Hole and the Little Baby Star*, *Flowering Spade*, *Run Wolves Run*, *Before We Turn to Dust* and 2016's *Low Light*. His most recent full-length we could confirm is *Be Like Water*, released Nov. 19, 2021, his ninth album and his first in five years. KQED, covering its release, framed it as a record about finding a way out of worry, which tells you something about where his songs tend to go.

Wherever his mailbox is now, this is still a home game.

We did not find an announced new album for this show, so treat it less as a release party and more as a check-in with a songwriter who has been touring steadily. His 2026 calendar has had him on the road well beyond the Bay: listings put him in Berwyn, Illinois, in July, up the coast in Bellingham and Portland in August, and in Brooklyn in September. Bay Area audiences have caught him at The Chapel in the Mission and at Oakland's New Parish in recent years; The Independent is the Western Addition stop on that circuit.

The room matters with an artist like this. The Independent is a club where a good crowd can go silent in a hurry, and Hayes is the kind of performer who earns that silence and then breaks it with a groove. Bring someone who has never heard him; that tends to be how his audience grows.

Saturday night in mid-November, a 9 p.m. start, a few hundred people who already know the words. Get there early enough to find your spot along the wall.

Sources: Wikipedia: Sean Hayes (musician) (en.wikipedia.org); KQED: Sean Hayes' new album 'Be Like Water' offers pathway from worry (kqed.org); Scaruffi: Sean Hayes discography (scaruffi.com); LPR Presents: Sean Hayes (lpr.com); TicketWeb: Sean Hayes at The Independent (ticketweb.com); JamBase: Sean Hayes at The Independent (jambase.com)