When speaking of San Francisco these days, it seems like it is stereotypically presented as either a city full of young tech nomads lining up for artisanal coffee, or as a blighted, urban hellscape of fentanyl zombies and street crime.

But with his sixth solo album 24th Street Blues, Tom Heyman sings of a more rank-and-file San Francisco, balancing the encroaching darkness of an overdeveloped cityscape with the fragile, abiding beauty of the Gold Gate City.

If you stay in one place long enough, you really start to see it change, he explains. Around 2010, the city started to feel like a movie that was sped up, jerking and lurching forward at a dangerously fast, celluloid-shredding pace with market forces feeling like a locomotive bearing down on anything or anyone in its path.

For over two decades, Heyman and his wife have lived in a sprawling, dilapidated, converted-storefront rental on 24th Street - deep in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission district. 24th Street Blues details his observations and interactions from years of living and working in the neighborhood as it weathered the storms and the aftermath of plutocratic expansion.

When listing to the hardscrabble sages that thread these songs together, it doesn’t sound like Heyman deliberately sought to create a concept album so much as he inadvertently followed the Mark Twain credo, Write what you know.

1. 24th Street Blues
2. Desperate
3. Barbara Jean
4. Sonny Jim
5. Hidden History
6. The Mission is on Fire
7. Quit Pretending
8. Like a Lion
9. Searching for the Holy Ghost
10. White Econoline
11. That Tender Touch
12. Desperate (redux)

This immaculate sculpted, heartfelt, observant and generously impassioned new recording opens on the luxurious, titular 24th Street Blues and the more forthright Desperate, before then bringing us the gently jangly Barbara Jean, the folk rocker Sonny Jim, and both the lonesome ode Hidden History and the Neil Young-esque The Mission is on Fire.

Along next is the ballad Quit Pretending and the upbeat Like a Lion and they are in turn followed by the free-flowing, Springsteen-esque pairing of the rocker Searching for the Holy Ghost and the milder balladry of White Econoline, the album rounding out on the countrified twang of That Tender Touch, coming to a close on a piano redux of Desperate.

24th Street Blues arrives packaged with a 60-page songbook comprising lyrics and music charts accompanied by a gorgeous collection of paintings and drawings that were designed as companion pieces for each song.

These were created by Heyman’s wife, Deirdre F. White, an artist and educator acutely tuned into composing images of modern dystopian inequality and the housing/mobility challenges of the American West.

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Tom Heyman @ Soundcloud