Category: Songs

Wednesday 3:30 PM

After the huge push from Sunday afternoon to Monday morning to finish up two demos, I took a needed break from any writing or recording over the last couple of days. I did feel pressure to keep productive, but I consciously gave myself permission to forget about the challenge for a day.

On Tuesday I spent a couple hours skipping through voice notes, going back to the springtime of this year, and writing out a list of song ideas.

Eventually I got to a bunch of ideas that carried over from the last challenge, and found a previous list of unfinished song ideas. Looking at it now, about six months later, I was pleased to find that several of the ideas on that list have now become finished songs. Still, there were more unfinished ideas than finished.

As it stands, my current list of unfinished songs has between 20 and 30 titles. These are mostly ideas developed within the last year, but some go back a couple years or more. Going through the voice memos, there are hundreds of ideas, but the titles on this list are ideas that have some kind of clear lyrical inspiration and direction.

A few of the songs are quite developed, ranging from about 50 to 75% complete. In theory, these should be the easiest to finish, but I often find it most difficult to try and stick the landing, especially with a song whose inspiration largely burnt out many months ago.

Most of these have a strong musical foundation with some kind of lyrical hook or concept, yet lack a clear angle or point of expression. Some literally have just one line attached. Others have the makings of a verse.

Over the last year my notes have become crowded with working drafts for entries on the website. This entry, for example, begins in my notes. That’s where it exists at the time I’m first putting these words down.

With all this said, I’m not 100% sure what song or songs I will complete this week. I think I’d like to try and finish two once again, but so far I haven’t had any new ideas. Instead I did pick up one song and make some progress on it. I’m hesitant to get into talking about the song specifically because I’m not sure that I will finish it yet, so I’m gonna leave it here and continue later, hopefully with some more direction.

Thursday night

I took a detour yesterday and today to prepare some music for upcoming gigs in October. I’m going to write an entry soon where I will share some of these.

With that said, last night after a few hours of transcription work, I revisited some notes and started writing a new song referencing two sets of lyrics I had written in early 2025, during a time when I returned to Australia and resumed travels in Tasmania. I believe having a bit of distance from my home country got me feeling safe to vent about the cult-like devotion to a certain right wing political figure. The lyrics are quite dark, and between starting a demo last night, rewriting the lyrics to fit the musical form, and another session today, the song’s taken on a pretty good shape.

I can’t say I really like this song, but it’s interesting enough to continue, and sometimes during these challenges the task calls for pushing through ideas that typically I wouldn’t get too invested in. At this stage it’s more developed than the song I was working on the previous couple days. And then I’ve been listening to a third song that’s been lingering for about six months and is quite close to being done.

I’m thinking now, how great would it be to finish all three by the end of the week? Anyway, the night is young. It’s not even 11 PM yet. I’m gonna set the intention now to check in before I go to bed and report on what happened, just in case.

Friday

Well, I didn’t make it back to the notes by the time my head hit the pillow, as I was still deep in thought and digging for ideas for the new song. One thing I’ve been doing since I started the challenge is falling asleep listening to the songs I’m working on, and when I wake up in the morning I’ll listen to them and try to write first thing, just in case I catch any inspiration in the night. That said, my dreams have been crazy the last few weeks and I should probably be writing songs about them, or at least writing them out, but that’s another story.

I’m happy to say that I put in some real work on the song that I’m calling Human Garbage. The demo has been shaped to have much more character, with a simple arrangement mostly revolving around a bass line and one guitar, although as the song develops a second guitar comes into the piece. It’s become quite a bit funnier than it was at the start and has this sort of melancholy Talking Heads feel musically. When I was reflecting on the song yesterday I mentioned that I didn’t like it all that much, but it’s really started to grow on me.

Friday, 6 PM

Now it’s coming up on 6 o’clock Friday evening, and I just took a long walk along the beach, reflecting on this and the second aforementioned but yet-to-be-named song, which I’m calling Don’t Waste Daylight.

I will often take my writing out into nature. I’ll go out to the forest or out on the beach, and I’ll walk and I’ll listen, and I’ll stop and write notes, and I’ll listen some more, and I’ll sit and I’ll write and take breaks, going through cycles, turning through the songs, seeking clarity and inspiration in my surroundings. Sometimes I’ll hike down the hillside to a beach with the intention that I will stay on the beach until I’ve made a certain amount of progress on an idea, until I finish the section or write a few more lines.

We had heavy rain last night and today is just the most perfect autumn day, bright and sunny and brilliant. I walked along tide pools, nearly slipping a handful of times, going further at a familiar spot than I have in nearly ten years of visiting. I saw dozens of crabs scurrying as the dogs and I approached, and I watched them in the pools. I found a cave that passed straight through the hillside, most all of this only accessible during certain low tide hours.

Hours passed before I hiked back up from the beach, and now I’ve got the lyrics and form all but worked out for both of these songs. I’m going to take a pause here before I begin speaking about the song called Don’t Waste Daylight.

I have a voice recording of this idea that dates back two years almost to the day, to September 23, 2024. At that point I believe I had already had the idea floating around for a couple of months…

Wednesday, September 30

Well, y’all, I totally lost track of keeping up with this entry. After leaving the beach, I just kept working on the songs continuously until the early Monday morning hours. The rest of this entry is written after the fact, now from Week Three of THE CHALLENGE. So from this point forward I’m going to be speaking retrospectively.

The songs are now finished, and for the purposes of this entry I’m going to focus on Don’t Waste Daylight. It’s funny, because I mentioned it early on but didn’t name it. I noted a song that I wasn’t sure I would continue working on or finish, but I had been circling it as a potential for the week.

The second song, Human Garbage, is completed, but it’s quite a dark and venomous song, and for the purposes of the archive and this entry I’m choosing not to elaborate on it. I will include it at the bottom if you care to listen, but the focus of this entry will be the background and process of Don’t Waste Daylight.

DON’T WASTE DAYLIGHT

At the beginning, the song was heavily inspired by some very superstitious friends that I lived with for a time. Where I would seek and find rational explanations for strange phenomena, such as a tarp flapping in the wind or an unfamiliar animal calling in the forest, they would be quick to jump to supernatural conclusions for any unexplained phenomenon. Spending time with them really changed my perspective in a way. I hadn’t really thought much about superstition for many years. Now, looking at adults right around my same age who fully believed that the world was filled with ghosts, aliens, cryptid monsters, etc., my view gradually shifted from “that’s kind of weird and funny” to a genuine interest, and eventually empathetic concern. Imagine if there were actual monsters in the world? They could be lurking in any given shadow. Monsters come in all shapes and sizes, and some say there is no limit to the human imagination. That’s terrifying!

The very first lyrics of this song were written from that perspective, as a warning essentially, that one should fear the dark because there are monsters outside: don’t waste daylight, it’s not safe in the night. Some of the original lines took this perspective with a mix of my own, for example: “body safe, but my mind is in doubt.” So I was writing at once from the perspective of a total believer in all the supernatural danger, yet sneaking in some lines of rationality, and it didn’t really work, or at least it didn’t go anywhere. It didn’t have a strong concept. I just knew that this song would be about the supernatural.

Over the course of a year or so I would pick it up every now and then, maybe every couple of months, write a few more lines and play with it. It was early on that I started to root it in something more real to me, which was my own fears and anxieties, and experiences with what I would have considered supernatural as a kid.

A couple weeks back I was texting an old friend, and he was asking me about where I live, my home in the forest. He asked me to send photos of the forest, and I did. I took some photos in broad daylight from a few different parts of the property, and he asked if I ever get scared of aliens. My response, which was genuine and simple, was: not since I was a kid. But I didn’t live in the forest as a kid, I was in the suburbs of Los Angeles. The spooky creatures that kept me up at night were entirely suburban.

Anyway, this question and my answer brought me right back around to this song. When I looked into my notes, I found that I had buried towards the end of the document some lines referencing a childhood experience I had of sleep paralysis.

And so during the week when this idea came back around, I was digging a little deeper, really remembering the paranoia and anxiety I felt as a child about the unknown. I knew I wanted to feature that experience of sleep paralysis, and I managed to compress the event into a verse and a half of lyrics. Then I continued on from there, saving only a few lines and scrapping well over a dozen from the previous draft. There was no more place for this imagined perspective of what a superstitious person might say to warn someone about the scary things out there. I feel too far removed from that now. And so the song turned into another biographical tale. It lives in a similar register to a song I wrote for the last challenge called Something Beautiful. There is some overlap in the events between these two songs, and they’re sort of sister songs, now that I think about it.

Before I get into the background and details of the sleep paralysis and all that went into the song, I’d like to share another thing that is only occurring to me as I write this. A couple years back I went through the long process of compiling all my songs into one document, and when I say all my songs, I mean all of my lyrical songs that had completed demos. Through that process of compiling song titles and lyrics, I also started keeping notes on the inspiration behind the songs, notes on the demo recordings, general thoughts, changes I’d like to make, their connection to any particular project or period, etc. It was in that process that I started to realize there were periods of my life which I’ve written a lot about, and on the other hand, large gaps. I noticed then that a major gap was my childhood and teenage years. Most of the songs I’ve written that have some kind of autobiographical reference start in my 20s and go on from there, and by no coincidence, that would’ve been when I really started writing songs. Previously I had written mostly instrumentals, and the first “songs” I had written were quite stupid. Perhaps there’s a correlation.

Regardless, I’m mentioning all this because both Don’t Waste Daylight and Something Beautiful tap into my childhood experience, along with a few others that have yet to be finished. There’s a song that’s been developed quite a bit which details two main recurring nightmares I had as a child, before I discovered lucid dreaming. I really should bring that to the table in the coming weeks. Writing about that period has happened organically, with these songs finished in 2026. Anyway, I’ll get back to the story of Don’t Waste Daylight.

SLEEP PARALYSIS

I must have been around seven years old, give or take, when this happened. I was living in my second childhood home in Temple City, California. I remember being quite sick with the flu and sleeping on a large spare bed we kept in an extra room that we called the den. It was across the living room from the house’s two bedrooms, and a step lower than the rest of the house. Thinking back, the space generally creeped me out as a kid because it had no real purpose. I guess on this night its purpose was to keep me quarantined while I was sick, as my older brother and I shared a room.

I woke up in the middle of the night. The room was very dark, with just enough light coming from the streetlights outside through the windows that I could see the walls and ceiling. I woke up in a state of panic, and I could see, extremely vividly, spherical glowing objects soaring around the room. There must’ve been around a dozen of them, moving along the ceiling from wall to wall, back and forth across the room. I couldn’t see faces or any other identifying features, but simultaneously I heard the sound of many voices, like a crowd of people talking. I could hear their voices very loudly, and in my child’s mind, in my state of shock and terror, I perceived these voices as belonging to these orbs of light. I couldn’t make out any distinct words, just a cacophony of chattering voices.

For a moment I didn’t even try to move. I was totally petrified, scared to make a sound or breathe or move suddenly in any kind of way. Whatever these things were, I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself. So after observing them for a short time, I turned over as quietly and slowly as I possibly could, covered my head with the blanket, closed my eyes, and cried as quietly as I could until I fell asleep.

It’s quite sad to say, but I didn’t feel safe or comfortable communicating something like this to anyone around me, and even if I had, I’m not sure I would’ve been able to get the words together to communicate what I experienced at that time.

And so life went on. Gradually I became less superstitious and more disillusioned with a lot of the things I’d been told to believe. I didn’t grow up in a very religious household, but it was around me, and I used to go to church with my neighbors, who were more of a run-of-the-mill American Christian family. I felt very invested in trying to have a relationship with God. Even at that young age I felt so intellectually isolated. I was dealing with a lot of existential stress and anxiety, and I would very often pray for relief: relief in my life and external situations, as well as relief from my anxiety, paranoia and anguish. Doubts would intensify as no relief ever seemed to come through prayer, and I became disillusioned from observing my neighbors and the other adults at the church.

I remember noticing lots of hypocrisy between what they would preach regarding the message of the Bible, their own personal interpretations, and the things they had to say about other people, even within the church. More than anything there was a wide gap between their actions and the words they would say, and all of this aided in breaking the illusion completely. I never got the sense that most of the people I was around at that time had a deep, mature and well-informed spirituality so much as a lot of posturing, petty competition, personal conflict, drama and hierarchy. It became clear to me that these people were not to be looked to for heavy existential matters, or any matters at all.

I’d say by the time I was eight years old I stopped believing in God, and with that just about every other superstition followed. I would still get scared watching horror movies or anything spooky or conspiratorial on TV. But I no longer had that early anxiety of the supernatural closing in on me. Instead, all my anxiety became fixated on the fact that I would die, and the only stories I ever heard that addressed those worries were just that, stories, from others who had elected to accept them as fundamental facts and leave it at that. Just the same today as when I was eight years old, that was not satisfying to me. But as an adult I’ve had a full life to live. Back then all I had was school, TV and a few adults around. My greatest escape was in dreams, and that’s where I did a lot of work.

I was over most of my superstitious thinking, but I would still wonder about that experience I had. I didn’t know yet about the phenomenon of sleep paralysis, and so it was this mystery in my life that I just could not explain.

Just a few years later, I began using the internet. I had limited time on there, as this would’ve been the dial-up days of AOL, and we had one computer in the house. I was at the bottom of the totem pole, so I was lucky if I got an hour or two in a day. I remember researching dreams online. I wanted to know why we dream, how dreaming worked, and whether others had experienced things like I had in their dreams. Eventually I would learn that what I had discovered naturally was called lucid dreaming. I had already been doing that for years before I ever knew what it was called.

So it would’ve been while reading about dreams that I found an article mentioning the phenomenon of sleep paralysis. That was a massive aha moment, for it was all there: visual and auditory hallucinations, a temporary state of paralysis, most likely to happen while sleeping on your back. I’ve always been a side sleeper, seldom sleeping on my back, and it all came back to me reading that article: I woke up on my back looking up at the ceiling, and that’s when I started hallucinating. At the time I was so scared, and my body was so out of whack with the flu, that I didn’t even realize I couldn’t move while it was happening. I remember feeling so heavy as I turned over to cover my head. It was such an empowering moment of understanding. And so my fascination with sleep, with the brain, with the conscious and subconscious grew. I wouldn’t have sleep paralysis again for a number of years.

SLEEP PARALYSIS AGAIN, A NUMBER OF YEARS LATER

I would’ve been around 18 or 19 years old, studying music at Citrus College, working as a server, and generally just running around gigging, dating and hanging out with minimal rest, sleep and often food. I had gotten in touch with a friend, Kevin, from high school. My high school experience was disjointed. I was expelled twice by the end of my junior year, and I’d fallen off the map with a lot of my friends, so now here we were a couple years later catching up.

I remember meeting him at a hookah lounge in Pasadena, California, where we caught up for some time. Eventually he brought up something he had been struggling with greatly. He told me that he had been seeing a therapist. I asked what was going on, and he told me that he had chronic sleep paralysis and that it was really bad. I was fascinated, of course, as the only instance of sleep paralysis I could remember was a significant event in my childhood. I must’ve told him about my experience then, but I remember more vividly what he told me, which was that every time it happened to him he would see demons, and the devil itself. That sounds a lot less mild than a few orbs of light flying around the room, and I could see it was clearly distressing for him. He was trying to work through it, and it was greatly affecting his sleep and mental health. We kept in touch for years after and it improved. Unfortunately I’ve lost touch with him and it’s been many years since we’ve spoken, so I hope that damn devil and those damn demons left him alone once and for all.

Anyway, within just a couple weeks after that conversation, I remember it was a very hot day and I was coming home from school with less than a half hour to get dressed and head off to work. Sleep deprived and overheated, I set an alarm for 15 minutes and laid down to rest my eyes. Before the alarm went off, I opened my eyes. I was laying on my back. I tried to move and nothing happened. My eyes were wide open and I was wide awake, but I could not move. I thought these exact words: “Oh. This is sleep paralysis!” I was legitimately excited. The moment after this thought, a figure appeared above me. Poof. It looked like a shadow several feet above me, about the length of my body. Even knowing it was sleep paralysis, my heart started pounding, and I shut my eyes and waited to regain control of my body. I got up and I was sweating. It was damn hot. I got up and left for work.

Much of what I detailed above made it into the final song. Towards the end of the writing process I thought about trying to include this later experience of sleep paralysis, but the song grew long enough, and I guess there was a nod to it with the ending of the tune: “Now I know why, but it don’t stop the fright.”

My views on these sorts of supernatural experiences have become more nuanced, in large part because of my close proximity to those who claimed to have had supernatural experiences, ghost sightings, etc. I no longer feel entirely dismissive of those experiences. Instead, I understand them as being a psychological phenomenon, that is to say, something that happens in the brain. Similarly to the way that we can hear and see things, and feel pain and pleasure, fear and joy, grief and love in a dream as very vivid lived experiences, we can experience all manner of phenomena while we are awake. But I draw a distinction between layers of reality, of realness. The experience of the dream is real to me, but it is not as real as the ground. It’s not as real as the air that I breathe, the trees, the life that surrounds me. It is not as real as the body that I can touch and touch with, or the sunlight that lights the day and warms my skin.

I do believe that a person can experience ghosts, aliens, monsters, etc. So if you come to me and say, “Hey, fuck you, I saw a damn ghost, so get out of here with your stupid song,” I’m not going to argue with you. I believe you. But my argument is that the ghost is not real in the same way that any physical object that we can both hold and taste and touch is real. And if you wanna say fuck you and get outta here with my stupid song anyway, that’s fine. Just please don’t hurt me.

THE PROCESS OF ACTUALLY PUTTING THE SONG TOGETHER

Back to the process of actually putting the song together. A couple months back I picked the song up, and that’s when I came up with the first line: “I used to believe some crazy shit, man.” I had almost the complete verse, although when I picked it up this week I did tweak a couple of lines. So I had my entry point, and basically everything else I had written previously was now irrelevant.

From that first verse, I wrote out the events of that sleep paralysis, with the intention of coming around to mention the discovery and explanation of sleep paralysis several years later. The motion into the following verse came to me while I was on the beach. I wrote the majority of those lines during that walk, from “If I had, who could I tell?” I struggled getting through that section because I felt it pulling me in a few different directions. I didn’t want to dwell on my time in church or the loss of my adopted Christian beliefs. Earlier drafts of that verse didn’t mention anything about the church, or who I could tell, but the more I sat with it, the more I realized that it was part of the pivot. In my mind, much of the superstition centered around those beliefs, along with having a child’s active imagination and unmonitored, unrestricted access to TV.

I knew that I would jump tense from the past to the line “Life is scary enough as it is.” That melody and that line came to me a couple months back when I picked up the song, along with the first verse, but I completed it throughout the week. I didn’t know where it would fit in the song. As I began rewriting it, I thought it would probably be at the end, but ultimately it felt more appropriate to push the discovery of sleep paralysis toward the end of the piece. When it did come time to write that section, the last lines just came naturally. That would’ve been towards the end of the week, probably on Saturday. That day I put in several hours on both songs of the week, finalizing the forms and much of the lyrics, and recording rough demos with the new forms and lyrics.

There’s even more detail I could go into about all this, but this entry has already grown far beyond the four minutes and a few handfuls of lines that went into the song.

The turn to include the line “I’m still there crying myself to sleep” just came in a moment and felt exactly right. I hadn’t really set out to acknowledge that even with a rational explanation we can still experience fright over the unknown. I acknowledge that the majority of life and existence is unknown, but I don’t fear the unknown. I take great comfort in it, and going into the unknown excites me terribly, where it used to terrify me. When that line came at the end of that verse, I thought that would be the end of the song, but that line told me to go back once again, back to the ghostly faces. And so the final verse adapted some of the earlier lines, rewritten to support the rest of the song and take it home. I surprised myself in the writing with that ending, and I was very pleased with it.

I no longer fear the dark, and I welcome more experiences of sleep paralysis and spooky things that lie beyond the edge of our regular, ordinary state of consciousness. But I can remember vividly being the child scared of everything, experiencing this bizarre phenomenon, and when I do reach that kind of state, like seeing the shadow over me during my last sleep paralysis, I still get scared. I’m still there.

“Don’t Waste Daylight“

I used to believe some crazy shit, man
I was terrified
Of gods, ghosts, monsters and aliens
Right outside my bedroom window
Inside, my heart and mind would race
I was just a kid
I didn’t know what was real

One night I was sick with the flu
I woke up and I was frozen still
I saw what I can only describe as
Orbs of light
Floating around the room
And I heard voices
More than scared, I was petrified
When I could, I turned and covered my head, shut my eyes and cried myself to sleep
I never told anyone what I’d seen

If I had, who could I tell?
The folks at church, still scared of demons in hell?
Watching them I grew skeptical
I quit believing in gods, ghosts, monsters and aliens
All my childish fears whittled down to one
Oblivion

Life is scary enough as it is
Don’t need monsters, don’t need religion
No need to believe in what I can’t taste or touch
Touch the ground and taste the sky
Don’t waste daylight and don’t fear the night
Shadows are nothing but the absence of light
They’re nothing to fear at all

I was twelve years old, obsessed with dreams and death
Reading about dreams I discovered sleep paralysis
It all made sense, that night frozen on my back
No ghosts, no voices, just myself there in the dark
I’m still there crying myself to sleep
Hush now, it’s only as real as a dream
It’s only as real as a dream

Still, ghostly faces were freaking me out
Body safe but my mind was in doubt
Painting shadows to play tricks on my eyes
Now I know why but it don’t stop the fright
I’m still there crying myself to sleep
Hush now, it’s only as real as a

Bonus song: Human Garbage

Thursday September 17, 2026

I’m thinking now I should have been more methodical as I gathered notes along this process. What I have is a song which is 80% complete and has been demoed twice up until that point, a large collection of notes and stories written over the last several days, a folder of reference photos, and lots of ideas that have yet to take any particular form.

I’m setting the intention during this round of the challenge to experiment with using other mediums in tandem with the songs. With this intention, it occurred to me that this website, this style of blog posting, is a creative medium in itself, and so I have decided to use this entry not only to detail the song and process, but as part of the process itself. I have decided for the moment to take a pause from working on the song itself and focus on organizing my ideas here, in hopes that in doing so I will have a clear concept for how I’d like to wrap up this song.

The title and subject of the song is Mount Baldy, a mountain peak in the San Gabriel Mountains east of Los Angeles, California. This is a significant site for me, and through the process of writing this song I have been reconnecting with a number of lost and cherished memories from a period of my life when I was staying regularly in the cities that lie just below the mountain: Upland and Ontario. Also, in reading up on the mountain, there are a number of interesting facts that I have learned, which I was surprised to discover so many years later.

The first is that what I have only ever known as “Mount Baldy” is actually named Mount San Antonio. Before I feel too embarrassed, Wikipedia literally says: “The mountain is almost always referred to as ‘Mount Baldy’ by locals, to the point where many may not recognize the name ‘Mount San Antonio.’” So I guess I’m not alone. I also did not realize that it was the highest mountain peak in the LA region, that it marks the county line between Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties, and that it is considered one of the deadliest mountain peaks in the United States.

The years of 2013–2017 were a period of near-constant motion. I spent over a year traveling across Europe before arriving back on my home continent and traveling coast to coast across Canada, arriving back in California in late summer 2014. From then I continued to travel every few months, taking hitchhiking trips around the US, traveling for seasonal work and tours, along with some international travel in 2016. In between travels, while I was in the LA area I would most often stay between two warehouses in Upland and Ontario that served as artist spaces and residences, rehearsal studios and lockouts, as well as hubs for a number of businesses, including a bike shop, a smoke shop, and a live sound, staging, and event production company — Rad Pro. I wrote more about this period in my entry for Our Golden Days Have Passed, and I intend to write more about the events of these years, but for now I’ll try to focus on the mountain.

BACK TO MT BALDY! As the years went on, my travels leaned further into extended stretches in nature, and the more time I spent sleeping under open sky, the harder it became to feel settled back in dense, populated LA. During spells in the city, Mt Baldy was the closest escape to nature I had. It was a significant place for me because it was my sanctuary, my access to, as I viewed it, the divine, which is just pure nature. A place I could get to pretty easily through driving. Go up and be in nature, be away from people, be by flowing water, go on hikes, have my adventures with my friends up on the mountaintop, and get that perspective. I would often take the drive solo, and I regularly visited during full moons, taking advantage of the bright nights to wander like a freak in the wild. In that time there were two separate overnight trips with friends that I took up at the top of the mountain, one became the entry point into the song. I will circle back around to the stories of these nights and their representation in the lyrics, but first I will pivot to how the song began last week.

I got inspired to write this song last week while driving highway 299 from Arcata to Redding, CA. I took a number of trips through this region during those years and memories were flooding back to me already while I passed along the Trinity river. I spent weeks at a time in Trinity county across several trips, I love the Trinity alps. I was noticing the breathtaking beauty of the mountains and realizing that I hadn’t spent much time in mountains over the last years. I used to escape often into the mountains or out to the desert during my previous life down in LA. In my new life I am a full time forest dweller, close to sea level— escaping instead to coastal trails, lonely beaches, up the rivers and lately into the redwoods but our tallest coastal mountain is modest in comparison to the Trinity mountains and Baldy.

While driving 299 lines started coming to me, for instance I noticed large portions of mountain walls along the road that were covered with netting and thought of the line “They drape nets over the mountain face to reduce tragedy and inconvenience” A number of other dark and silly lines followed, and soon I recalled a night on Baldy. I had gone up there with a friend, we caught the ski lift up during the day and ate some mushrooms and had a fun time roaming around the mountain, laughing a lot and hanging amongst the trees. After nightfall I had wandered off on my own and came upon a structure where ski lifts would launch. It was off season and there was no snow on the mountain, these higher lifts were not operational and there seemed to be no one else on the mountain besides us. I climbed on top of the structure and stayed up there for a while watching the city. This experience is so vivid in my memory, I can remember what it looked and felt like, and I can remember what I was thinking about at the time. From then I captured the first lines, which became:

On shrooms at the top of mt baldy
I climbed up on a ski lift hut
In the night I watched over the city
Down below just squiggly lights
And I felt like batman

That was it, I remember literally feeling like batman for a second and having a little giggle on my own at the thought. As I sat there and looked out at the city lights I felt a deep connection to the mountain and had a heavy feeling that I wanted so badly to live there. I started to think about the practical possibilities of living either in Mt Baldy village, or even up at the top. Could I find a job at the ski lodge? With the forest service? I was thinking about Mt Baldy but really I just felt that I needed to live in a place like that.

Around that time I was beginning to think about my identity as an artist and wanting to develop a concept that I could take with me as I perform and put my music out into the world. So then I began to imagine a sort of mythology, imagining myself as a character, or caricature. I have this life where I go between being an earth traveling nature dwelling hippie, and then being a broke bum in the city. The concept was thin, but basically I thought about playing up this contrast and presenting myself as a hermit who lived in nature and only went to the city to play gigs. Part of this was also that when I’d go to the city, I’d always find myself in these ridiculous and chaotic situations. Which was true to how I felt: when I was in nature, when I was on the road, away from the city, life was golden. And when I was in the city I’d end up dealing with stressful situations— run ins with police, bureaucracy, getting into altercations with aggressive people, and so on. It’s still that way, kind of.

Friday September 18, 2026

Continuing from the opening image of the song. In hindsight, those visions that I had up there would come to pass in their own way. I didn’t end up living on Mount Baldy, but within a year I had arrived in my new home town of Port Orford, where I live on a hill above a tiny town, 800 miles away from the city of squiggly lights that I was watching that night. I don’t live fully isolated from society, but we do live in a rural and quite isolated town, and I’ve gone through periods of living alone, spending days at a time at home without seeing another person.

Obviously I didn’t leave the mountain that day and decide, okay, I’m gonna move to Port Orford. One thing led to another and my life took that shape. A lot of my thoughts and feelings are inspired by place, and by time spent in a place, and these thoughts came through the combination of the state of mind I was in, the mountain, the environment, the quiet, the distance and the space, and then the perspective from looking at the city. I believe this is why this memory remains so vivid, despite being something I haven’t thought about in years.

On Sunday afternoon when I began actually writing the song I took this vision as inspiration for the second and third verses:

It was there I had visions of a future
Soon to come of a home far away
Somewhere i’d seek peace as a hermit
Undisturbed by the lights below
My own mount baldy

I was drunk on visions of the future
Until all thought melted away
I was taken with the grace of the mountain
And entranced with the lights below
Sweet mount baldy

I mentioned that the first lines that came to me on highway 299 were about the perils of mountains in general. When I sat down to write the song it ended up becoming more about my own personal relationship with this particular peak. The role it played in my life and the gifts it has given me, the vision and the memories. Still I wanted to address the dangerous side of Baldy in the song.

In the last ten years, over twenty people have died while hiking on Mt Baldy. I found an informative article that details how and why Baldy is so dangerous. Although I never tried to tackle the Devil’s Backbone trail in the dead of winter I just feel lucky that I had been safe and sound on every visit to the mountain, despite doing some risky things over the years such as taking mind altering substances, wandering in wilderness at night, climbing on structures that aren’t meant to be climbed… and all of the above at once. I dropped my silly lines about the dangers of the mountain and instead wrote about how fortunate I have been and acknowledged those who have not been so lucky. The last verse also refers to a couple of separate full moon visits to the mountain, moon bathing and spending time by a creek I found in the night. The lyrics continue:

Mt Baldy
You were always kind to me

My safe haven from the city
I’m still counting shooting stars

While others haven’t been so lucky
Mt baldy deadly mount baldy

Every year people fall from the mountain
By my luck I only ever fell in love
I been naked on the slopes in the moonlight
Dipped my hands in the creek and cried
My sweet mt baldy

At this point I have caught up to the end of the lyrics as written. I had a couple of variations for verses afterwards but decided to cut them and take some time to consider where the song ends. On the current demo, there is an interlude followed by a solo after these lines but what else is left to say? Have I said enough already? I don’t have the answer just yet, but for now I’d like to share some more memories from the mountain.

A couple months before the scene that started the song I took the ski lifts up with three other friends. We had planned to camp out overnight but once night came we found ourselves alone on the mountain and discovered some tent cabins which were sitting unoccupied. With the purest of intentions we curiously inspected them for any entry points and found that we could easily get into the cabins without causing any damage. We were thrilled to discover we could spend the night in these cabins and the four of us split off and spent the night two to a cabin. We left without a trace the following morning and when we were ready to take the lift back down the mountain we discovered that there truly was no one around and the lifts and resort were not operational that day. We weren’t planning to hike up or down the mountain during this trip, but hike down we did. After sitting for a long while outside the Top of the Notch we made our way down. I remember the sun came up hot and we were getting cooked on the way down but in good company, we had a great time. I cherish that trip up (and down) the mountain.

Back to the night on top of the ski lift hut. After coming down I found my friend and we made our way to the trusty tent cabins where we each took a cabin for ourselves for the night and left again without a trace.

I no longer live in or even frequent LA. My visits are usually short and focused on time with family, with maybe a couple small excursions during a trip. But all this writing has got me wishing to return to the mountain and give thanks in person. Seeing what lessons Baldy may have for me today. It has been nearly ten years since my last visit, far too long, but hopefully long passed the statute of limitations on breaking into tent cabins.

After taking a break from writing and returning to the song lyrics I feel that I’m being pulled towards a final verse. I have been moving away from mystical thinking these days but I might indulge for a second here to treat the the shift towards my life in nature as being a manifestation of the vision that came to me on Mt Baldy.

Sunday September 20, 2026

This week certainly flew on by. Now here we are at Sunday, the end of the weekend for proper working folks. For us in the songwriting challenge this is our due date, make or break. It’s 12:36 PM now and I just took a look at the email chain to get the stats. Coincidentally just 12 minutes ago, we received the 12th submission of week 1. That means a third of the participants have submitted already, looking good! And sounding good too. Typically in these groups Sunday night is a time where the majority of submissions come in, I’d figure between about 7 PM and midnight alone there may be another dozen or more coming in. I’m often the last one, submitting my song in the early hours of Monday morning.

In most cases I use these periods not only to finish the lyrics and guitar/vocal arrangement of a song but to produce fully fleshed out demos with layered guitar and vocal tracks, along with bass, drums, percussion and often additional keyboard parts etc. I had been writing about Mount Baldy since Thursday but before I even began writing on this here page I had already gone through the initial drafts, to a more fleshed out (but rough) demo, and finally re recorded a second demo at a more appropriate key and tempo. Truth be told, I have yet to sit down and write the lyrics for the final verse of Mount Baldy but I have made some great progress since signing off this entry on Friday and now.

During these challenges I start to hear music differently, particularly the music that comes into my head and out of the instruments I play. I’m constantly looking for bright ideas that will be exciting enough to follow to the end. Somehow during these writing spells the musical and lyrical ideas just seems to have more juice and viability than usual. With that said a previously unfinished idea that started over a year ago, during another round of the song a week challenge kept popping into my head as the week went on.

On Friday afternoon I drove a half hour up to Bandon to pick up a cheap Ibanez guitar off facebook marketplace. After picking up the guitar I went to a park with the dogs and walked out to a picnic table with the new guitar and started working out this song. Now, this is a song I’d picked up, hit a creative wall on, and dropped two challenges back. Then in the last challenge I did the same exact thing. Leaving it about 60-70% done but just not being able to figure out the rest. By the time I left the park I’d say I had it about 90% figured out.

The song is called “Girl At The Cafe” and it is inspired by a friend. Because it is quite personal and written about events from his actual life I won’t go into great detail about the story behind the song, but its all in the lyrics. It’s essentially about a time that he had felt quite lonely in his relationship and developed a crush on a barista at his local cafe, this never developed beyond a crush but it was enough to test his relationship and cause some strain between him and his wife. The song is focused on the moment of confession and feelings leading up to it but in actual life they worked through it and have a strong relationship that has lasted many years past this event. Regardless I found it to be very interesting and worthy of writing about at the time, and the tune has carried over appearing in my mind over the last year beckoning me to be finished. I will include the song below once the recording is finished as a bonus to this entry, rather than giving its own entry elsewhere on the site.

Late Friday/Saturday morning hours after writing out the previous portion of this entry and tinkering with the new guitar for a couple of hours. (I printed and added an Ibanez PGM inspired f hole to the guitar:)

I went into the studio and by 2 AM I was recording the new arrangement for Girl At The Cafe. By around 7 AM it was all but finished. Then against my better judgement instead of going to sleep I followed the creative spark and put in about an hour and a half of work on the demo for Mount Baldy. For the purposes of the challenge they’re both just about as good as done, especially Girl At The Cafe, but I have a list of notes for improvements I’d like to make on the mix and arrangements. I’ll often do this while working on a song, listen to it on repeat and write down anything I’d like to change. Here are some examples of what are in my notes now:

– drums simpler before/during verse
– V1 accents second half on 3
– drum fill on “life”
– open hit hat on “you’re my light” then switch to crashes – this section needs it’s own dynamic/identity

These are just the first note on Girl At The Cafe but I have a bunch eventually getting into some notes on the bass and melodic parts that could use some more character. I’ll listen and often hear additional parts in which case I will switch over to voice notes and record myself singing the melody/drum part/bass line etc. acapella for reference. I can never rely on my memory to hang onto an idea. In fact for the end of Mount Baldy I was listening in the shower and had a melodic idea which I HOPE I will remember later as I get to finishing the demo, but I don’t expect to.

Now I’ve got a couple hours to get some work done here in the studio before I join a friend and member of the group, Dune Laila, for a video project we’re starting today. I’ll start by going through the notes and for both the songs I think I’d like to record most of the guitar parts so I’ll be setting up an amp with a couple of mics to get some live takes and actually move some air. Up until this point all the guitars recorded have been recorded direct using amp sims and effects in Logic. I’ll likely be finishing the demos in the late night, so I’ll check in and hopefully finish up this entry then. To be continued…

Monday September 21, 2026 7 AM

It is done, done enough. I am too burnt to reflect on the recording process at the moment, but I may update this at a later date. For now here are the songs.

“Mount Baldy”

On shrooms at the top of mount baldy
I climbed up on a ski lift hut
In the night I watched over the city
Down below just squiggly lights
And I felt like batman 

It was there I had visions of a future
Soon to come of a home far away
Somewhere i’d seek peace as a hermit
Undisturbed by the lights below 
My own mount baldy  
Mount baldy 
Sweet mount baldy

I was drunk on visions of the future
Until all thought melted away
I was taken with the grace of the mountain
And entranced with the lights below
Sweet mount baldy 

Mount baldy mount baldy mount baldy
You were always kind to me
My safe haven from the city 
I’m still counting shooting stars
While others haven’t been so lucky

Mount baldy deadly mount baldy
Every year people fall from the mountain 
By my luck I only ever fell in love
I walked naked on the slopes in the moonlight
Dipped my hands in the creek and cried
My sweet mount baldy 

It’s been ten long years since the night 
I had that vision on the mountain top
I knew then that to live  in nature
I would have to leave the squiggly lights
And leave mount Mt Baldy

Now I’m living on a hill by the sea
A thousand miles from the city
The only lights I see are stars above
How’d I get to be so lucky
Mt Baldy Mt Baldy told me

Now I’m long overdue for a visit with   you (Mt Baldy)
What vision will I find at the top of the climb (Mt Baldy)
I’ll be careful on the slopes I know you’ll be kind (Mt Baldy) 
Humbled at the peak I will tell you one thing
Mt Baldy Thank you Mt Baldy

“Girl At The Cafe”

How could I feel so alone
While I share this life with you
Please forgive me
I can’t help my restless heart

Years ago we eloped
Left my homeland for yours
Frozen winters, Arctic winds
Saved me from a sinking ship
Father homeless
Mom unavailable
Brother tried to take his life
You’re my light

Please forgive me
I can’t help my restless heart

You’ve been out of town for work
And I’ve been on my own
Went to dinner with your friends
And felt I don’t belong
I broke down crying in front of them
As they spoke words that I can’t understand yet

I find comfort at the cafe
The gal that works there is warm and friendly
She speaks to me in my mother tongue
She asks about me and where I’m from

One night I saw her in the city
With her friends, they’d been drinking
She lit up, told them about me
Can’t stop thinking about the way she hugged me

Please forgive me
I’m falling for another soul
The girl at the cafe
The girl at the cafe
The girl at the cafe
The girl at the cafe

Monday 9 PM

More hours have passed and I got a bit of shut eye. I’ve also had a chance to listen to these two recordings dozens of times. The songs still need quite a bit of work and the demos themselves will get some more attention in the coming week. With that said, I’m quite pleased with how they came together.

Mount Baldy was a journey which, in the last push through the early morning hours, felt like climbing a mountain at points. Moments like this, I’m especially grateful for the challenge. I was banging my head against the wall for a while. There would’ve been countless moments with other songs where I would’ve hit that bump in the road and put the song down, telling myself I’ll pick it up later, and many of those songs would sit untouched to this day. Doing the challenge creates a sense of urgency and fosters a determination to continue, to take real time, go past the comfort zone and get over the bumps in the songwriting road.

This entry directly shaped the direction of the song. I noted above the point at which I had stopped writing this song and began writing the entry. The intention was to get as much as possible out of my head in order to look back, holding buckets of words here against the handful in the song, to figure out what was left to be said. Thoughts I had expressed above on Friday were adapted into the final verses of the song.

I started writing a song about perilous mountains and psychedelic sleepovers with friends on the mountain. The verse began with one image and a joke. Really, I did feel like Batman up there on top of that structure I climbed, looking over the city, but its place in the song was meant to be comical. Through the reflections above I realized more and more that I was at a pivotal stage in my life, and that what I was feeling on the mountain that night was something that had been building for years and coming to a head in those days, getting to the sunset of my time staying in the city.

The feeling of being alone on the mountain, surrounded by nature, just felt like everything I ever wanted all at once, looking down at the city as a place I often felt the need to escape from. I no longer wanted to live in a place that I felt the need to escape from.

This is what the song really became about: showing gratitude for the memories and perspective that came during my time on Mount Baldy.

I imagined that the last verse would return to that night on the mountain, describing my descent from the ski lift hut, catching up with my buddy and posting up in the cabins for the night. I thought I might write about other visits to the mountain, recounting more memories from my visits to Baldy. But instead I felt the proper ending was to acknowledge the turn that my life has taken after that pivot, marking that night as significant to my story. Expressing my gratitude for the mountain in the past, and the nature that carries me today in my small town coastal life.

Even as I started writing the song, I hadn’t clicked yet that the events of that night on Baldy happened ten years ago. I just passed my nine year anniversary of arriving on the Oregon coast. I’ve lived here over a quarter of my life. I have no longing for the city, but I genuinely feel that it’s been too long since I’ve visited Baldy, and I intend to visit next time I’m down in the area. When I do, I will give thanks. In the meantime I will sing this song.