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- waves wash over me 🌊
hello from the last day of my family’s 2nd annual beach week!
tomorrow a 7am flight brings me back to reality, but for one more glorious day the beach, the sand, and the sunny skies are here to be enjoyed.
the texture, the colors, the sounds, the salty sea air—it’s all there
I’ve always found the beach incredibly inspiring, in part because I never grew up with it.
the beach was always a faraway concept that some of my favorite musical artists made constant references to.
(the latter being a major inspiration for my song “Sandals”—in fact, I can’t imagine anyone who has seen The Endless Summer hasn’t wanted to uproot their life completely in favor of chasing waves)
the beach, and especially the California coast, had its own sonic identity that oozed a type of cool I never encountered in the plains of mid-western Canada or the mountains of central Virginia.
and in fact, as I’ve gotten more hip to music from across the western hemisphere, the beach or the coast shows up as a constant musical as well as lyrical theme:
“Me Voy Pa’la Costa” - Rosendo y su Banda (Colombian Cumbia)
“Guajira Del Mar” - Orquesta Akokan (Cuban Guajira)
“Wave” - Antonio Carlos Jobim (Bossa Nova)
to my ear, songs about the sea evoke a conflict that lies at the heart of human experience: endless, incomprehensible beauty contrasted against the overwhelming force of nature.
but having not grown up around the beach, the water is very unfamiliar to me. it almost feels like it isn’t my own to experience. I’m scared of it, to be honest—I try not to venture too far out into the water, knowing the dangers that inexperience present.
that makes it difficult to incorporate into my own music in some ways. if I draw on these influences, I sometimes feel as if I’m talking about something that isn’t true to me.
yet as I grow older, I at least grow more comfortable with the unknowable. it’s a psychedelic concept to me: life is inherently unknowable, and it’s up to each individual to understand how to process that for themselves.
that’s how it manifests in my music, I guess. I’m telling a story that may not be my own, but that holds some truth I see reflected in my own life.
regardless of what I think about it, as I sit on the sand and look out at the waves, I feel the ocean’s power deep within my bones.
unlike the mountains or the desert, you can reach out and touch the ocean—you can hold it in your hand and even immerse yourself in it. water slides through the smallest cracks and crevices while covering nearly three quarters of the earth’s surface. so rarely do I feel like I can look out on nature (or life!) and perceive its vastness and immediacy at the same time.
the beach forces you to do so. it bridges the gap between the unknowable and the familiar. isn’t that what we’re trying to do as artists?
last saturday, my great friend and drummer Eduardo joined me for a low-key performance at the Allships Creator House in Williamsburg.
I haven’t talked about it so much in this newsletter yet, but two or three years ago (as most of the IRL bars and clubs were closed due to COVID) I immersed myself in an online music community based around music NFTs.
gasp yes, N F Ts, the very same term that has been memed into oblivion. but the nomenclature often gets in the way of the spirit of the movement, which was to leverage emerging technology to disrupt the music industry and discover new ways for artists to build sustainable streams of income.
well, in all honesty, we didn’t succeed. or I should say, we haven’t succeeded yet. much of the music NFT hype as you can imagine was based around crypto hype, and when the bottom fell out of that market the writing was also on the wall for this online community.
fast forward two years, though, and many of us have kept building in our own ways. this newsletter is the natural evolution of the substack I used to help write for wavWRLD, a dormant but nonetheless active community that developed some extremely innovative initiatives such as:
NFT-gated live performances
Curation competitions
the wavGAME—a digital trading card game where NFTs could be combined and traded in for cooler and cooler IRL experiences
many of these ideas were before their time, which is why I’m so excited to have found another community—this time more grounded in real life—aimed at exploring the connection between art and technology.
it’s early days yet, but if this experimentation results in cool and fulfilling artist showcases like we saw last weekend? count me in.