Does New Zealand teen’s new ‘San Jose’ song capture the city’s spirit?

Just more than 50 years after Dionne Warwick’s “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” became a hit and put a then-small California City on the musical map, there’s a new song penned as a “love letter” to the capital of Silicon Valley.

It’s called “San Jose” and it was written and sung by Grace Kelly, a 16-year-old girl who lives in New Zealand. Yes, New Zealand.

As Team San Jose CEO Karolyn Kirchgesler explained at the annual meeting for the city’s public-private marketing partner, Kelly’s dad got a job in San Jose when she was 8 and she became a frequent visitor to Silicon Valley for the next several years. He moved back to Auckland, New Zealand, two years ago but his daughter, an aspiring singer/songwriter, never forgot her “home away from home.”

About six months ago, Kirchgesler got an email telling her about the song, and she put Laura Chmielewski, Team San Jose’s vice president of marketing, in charge of organizing a professional team to make a promotional video for the 3-minute song. The finished product features Kelly and does a good job of showcasing a hit parade of San Jose locales — the San Jose Flea Market, Japantown, SoFA District, Willow Glen and Santana Row, as well as tree-lined neighborhoods and parks and grassy foothills. Yes, it’s slick, but it’s also a marketing video aimed at people who don’t live here.

As for the song itself, Kelly’s pop-country tune has a twangy, Nashville sound, which the social media crowd has declared is entirely wrong for San Jose. (My parents, who frequented the Saddle Rack back in the day, would disagree.) The song name-checks Willow Glen and — believe it or not — the light rail, and you can pick up Kelly’s affection for the area. The teen singer/songwriter will be on San Jose country station KRTY (95.3 FM) Friday morning at 8 a.m. with morning hosts Gary Scott Thomas and Julie Stevens, and she’s scheduled as the opening act for the station’s Song & Wine series at Clos La Chance this week.

Try as it might, “San Jose” doesn’t capture the full San Jose experience. But how could it? The city and its music are too diverse for any single song to capture their essence. For some, the sound of San Jose is mariachi, for others it might be taiko or even skate punk (and, based on conversations I’ve had, a member of Team San Jose’s leadership is in that third camp). And as for the argument that Kelly’s song shouldn’t be used to market the city because it lacks authenticity, well, just show potential visitors a picture of someone in a car looking at their phone. That’s authentic San Jose.

Kelly’s tune is actually the second song about San Jose in less than a year, following “A Secret Place,” which was written and performed by Jackie Gage, the talented jazz vocalist who grew up in the city and graduated from Santa Clara University. She’s building her music career in New York City, but the wistful song had its public debut at the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest last August and Gage unveiled a video for it during a concert at City Lights Theatre Company in January.

At their hearts, both Kelly’s and Gage’s songs are about missing San Jose’s people and places after moving on. For that matter, Warwick’s classic is, too, with the singer longing to return to San Jose’s friendly confines after being put through the L.A. wood chipper. (It was lyricist Hal David, not Warwick, who was actually fond of his time in San Jose following World War II.) Could one of the city’s problems be that nobody really likes San Jose until they’ve gone to live somewhere else?

The South Bay has a storied music scene, but only a few homegrown bands have really hit it big and I can’t think of any memorable songs about San Jose that they produced. If I’m wrong, I’d love to hear them. And on June 21, on Make Music Day, the City Hall Rotunda will be filled with songs that the city’s residents wrote about San Jose. Will any of them — or Kelly’s song or Gage’s song — have the staying power of “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”? Probably not, but it shouldn’t matter.

There’s room for more San Jose songs. If you don’t like one, write something new.