ericprincessdragon

Category: Songs

Our Golden Days Have Passed

This is the last song I wrote for the winter/spring round of the 2026 songwriting group. It was written during an extremely emotional time. I was mourning the sudden death of a dear friend – Stephen Reed – and I had returned to the LA area, the place where I spent the first 20 years of my life and a few more on and off after that.

I took two trips down and spent nearly a month there consecutively – more time than I’d spent down there in seven or eight years, including flying home for a weekend in between. I was returning to people and places I hadn’t returned to in far too long. I knew that I had to. In this time, I had to reconnect.

The relationships and conversations that came out of that month were long overdue. Some of my oldest and dearest friends – people I’ve known for half my life, people we were brought together by music. We played in bands together, played countless gigs together. There was a period for me from about 18 to 21 where my life revolved mostly around this community. We were studying music, working whatever jobs we had, but most of our free time revolved around each other. We played cover gigs, corporate events, fundraisers, weddings, country clubs, bars and restaurants. Beyond all that, we all had original projects going, playing bars, clubs, house parties, pizza spots and more. When we weren’t playing we were together – piling into cars to go on all sorts of adventures day and night.

We were young, idealistic, naive, lucky. Life felt simpler then. I’m not sure we knew quite who or what we were. I know I didn’t. But somehow none of us have changed all that much. We’ve aged into our 30s and 40s now – still young, but no longer living wildly and freely and recklessly. The gigs and hangouts no longer feel endless and playful in the same way.

I drove by Rad Stop – the first building a group of my friends began renting, which turned into many things over the years. First a rehearsal studio, then a bike shop, eventually a warehouse with many rooms used as artist studios and residences. It was one of my main home bases when I was visiting and spending time down there between 2014-2016. I stayed in several different rooms throughout the years. It was eventually condemned and demolished. Rad Pro, the successor to that space and the place where many of my early recordings were made – where I lived, kept space, and ran live sound for bands – has since moved and the original location is all boarded up. But Rad Stop is simply gone. When I drove by it was the first time I’d been in that area in eight or nine years. Where it once stood there is now an empty lot surrounded by a fence. In between the cement cracks there are weeds reaching up to the sky.

I had a conversation with my old friend Ivan that I keep coming back to. He told me he’d been quite sad thinking about the people we came up with. He wanted to put on a concert in his parents’ backyard like he used to, invite bands from back in the day – but he quickly realized that three of the bands he thought of have all had members who passed away at tragically young ages. Stephen is just the latest in that string of three. Ivan said that they used to feel like we had so much promise, so much potential, all of us reaching for our dreams. But we’ve lived long enough to see the end of some of those dreams, the end of some of those stories. To him it appeared that those were golden days, when we were becoming. But those days are gone and now we are what has been.

I replied: that’s bleak, bro.

I told him I don’t feel that way. For me the growth has not stopped. I’m still learning, still crossing boundaries and finding myself on the other side of good things. I still believe in our potential – individually and collectively. We are still here and our stories are not done yet. And even in the case of Stephen, the actions of his lifetime are still ringing out in ways that are truly powerful and surprising. His work and influence on earth is not done. His story is not done.

But still I was definitely feeling Ivan’s sentiments. It seemed like many people I visited with were struggling – with their work, their living situations, their relationships and the grief of losing our friend.

Friends told me they wished I hadn’t left. They asked if I was coming back to stay. I told them no. Leaving one gathering, a friend asked if I was heading back to Oregon. I said yes. He asked when he would see me again. I said I don’t know.

I’m writing this at home. I just stepped out the front door and into the forest. I feel no worry for tomorrow, little stress from the day. I’ve managed to find myself in a place I genuinely love, living a relatively simple, but fulfilling, interesting and peaceful life in a small town by the sea.

But I carry complicated emotions around it. Deep gratitude for this life sits right alongside shame and guilt when I return to that place and those friends. In order to find this life for myself, I had to the old life behind.

This song became a meditation on these feelings, these thoughts. Giving into some of the bleak and fatalistic feelings of the time and all that comes with the idea that our golden days may have passed.

“Our Golden Days Have Passed”

I left pieces of my heart in chunks down below
Hit the road to save my soul
To build new life I let the old one go
I didn’t mean to abandon you
I didn’t mean to abandon you

Is it too late to say I love you too
Is it too late to show my face in this place
Where we once built a home now it’s an empty lot
Gone without a trace fenced up and blocked off
Now there’s just a few weeds reaching up J
ust a few weeds reaching for us

Our tribe was broken up spread out and beaten down
And I feel like an alien when I come around
Until we’re face-to-face and we start digging in
We’re all struggling

What started with a dream ended in death
The best of us is gone we are what’s left
Becoming has past now we are what has been
Stuck in the present
Our golden days have passed
Our golden days have passed

2026.03.22
Body

This song began on February 2, 2025, the second day of FAWM – February Album Writing Month, a worldwide challenge to write a song every other day totaling fourteen songs by the end of the month. I had just rediscovered fawm.org when signing up and found that I already had an account from 2015. Here I was nearly ten years later attempting it for the first time.

I was traveling by van in Tasmania. I drove out to stay the night near a small town called Evandale, where I was going to meet an artist named Kier Stevens for an interview the next morning. I found a lot near a small river where people camp their RVs overnight. I got there, walked my things out to a little gazebo and made myself a camp meal – lentils, rice and tuna, pretty standard camp cooking throughout my time in Tassie. Afterwards I took a seat at the edge of the gazebo facing out towards the road, played guitar on my camp chair and watched the sunset. The melodies and words came all at once. By the time the sun went down I had worked out the changes, melodies and most of the words.

The next day I did the interview with Kier in the park. On the fourth I recorded the original demo – I was staying with my good friend Josh, who rented a room with two beds at a little bed and breakfast up in Ulverstone on the north coast of Tassie. While he was off working during the day I set up and recorded the demo in the room, playing his 1950s jazz guitar and trying not to sing too loudly.

Original Demo:

The most recent demo came at the end of that visit, already into March. The bones are from the original but if you listen to them back to back you’ll hear some differences – new layers, new vocal takes, guitars, programmed parts, percussion, drums, synthesizers. Most of what came after the Ulverstone recording was done in the van, most of it in one very cold night where I felt a massive burst of inspiration and stayed up till the sun came up just working on this tune. It was too cold to play guitar so any ideas that came into my head I would program with the keyboard on my laptop. By the time I was done, the sun had risen so ferociously hot that I couldn’t sleep! That was rough on the body. The most recent mix was done on the plane flying over the Pacific in the middle of March on my way back to the US.

I wasn’t able to balance the FAWM challenge with traveling, living out of the van, doing interviews and gigs and other recordings. All in all I think I only wrote three songs that month. This was the first and the best of them.

The song is about something I was feeling at the time – that I needed to get more into my body. It’s been a lifelong pattern for me to spend so much of my time either focused on external activities and pursuits or otherwise internal. I am a very mental person. I spend a lot of time in my thoughts. At times I feel like my body just hangs from my head. I take care of it with basic maintenance, I try to eat well and sleep when I can, but the serious thoughtful intention I put into my body is a fraction of what I put into my thoughts, my creative pursuits, my skills, my travels, my studies, my people and so on.

A more specific realization at the time of writing this song was that I was coming out of a period of maybe five or six months where I was deeply concerned with mortality – exploring the philosophy around death. I read several books, listened to hours of lectures, interviews and podcasts, and wrote about half a dozen songs concerning death and mortality in one way or another. These thoughts go in waves for me, something that has come and gone since I was a child, but this was a particularly deep and productive time. I feel I managed to move the ball forward. I was sitting quite comfortably with the topic by the end of it.

But the thing I felt most strongly by the end of it all was simply this: I possess the antidote to any concern, any worry, any fear around death. I am alive. I have a body. I am a body. All that rumination, as useful as it may be for writing songs and gaining perspective, is not really all that productive in itself. What if every hour I’ve ever spent worrying about death had been spent instead just focusing on what I can sense, on being truly alive, engaging directly with life in a visceral way, using all of me and not just the words sounding silently in my head.

I believe my death does not concern me. The only thing I should be concerned with is life. And so this song is a manifesto, a meditation, a reminder – to be present, to seek presence and stay present, to seek comfort and fullness within the body as it is. Not to get too carried away with the external or the internal dialogue.

It’s been a year since I wrote this. I’m still largely concerned with the externals and the world of my thoughts. But I have felt much more at peace within my body in the last year. I guess the declaration stuck.

“Body”

I’ve been running from the void
What did that bring?
But sickness of mind
And so much long lost time
I will ditch my bags
Try to sit still
I’m not used to being in my body
I’ll get used to it

Body heals itself
Unlike mind
Which left unchecked grows sick with time
And I got used to it
Now I want peace inside

In the body
Coming home
Take some time find peace inside

2026.03.21
My Opinions

My Opinions began with lyrics written around February 2022. I don’t remember a specific incident that inspired them – the inspiration just seemed to be all around me. The earliest recording was an acapella voice memo I made while driving in the rain, awkwardly hunting for a melody with the lyrics in my mind. By mid-March the melodies were mostly worked out but I’d only written about half the song. It wasn’t until late 2023 during a song-a-week challenge that I finally finished it.

Revisiting it now while writing this entry I went back and listened to those early demos. The earliest full version had this bouncy, upbeat fingerpicking feel – faster, more driving, more attitude. At some point I settled into something more laid-back and lost that edge. Listening back I think I prefer the earlier version. I might go back to it.

This is a satirical song. The narrator is someone whose personal identity is so intertwined with their opinions that they can’t separate the two – and yet they have no real awareness of where those opinions came from in the first place.

I used to think I was writing songs like this to point a finger at what I saw wrong in the world around me. But I think it’s more honest to say that these songs are cautionary notes to myself. I’ll take on a character, point outward, but really I’m processing something I recognize in myself. A frustration, a dissatisfaction, a tendency I want to keep in check.

In this case I am writing about somebody whose opinions have gotten away from them – yet I am beaming with opinions about having opinions while I do it.

An opinion isn’t a preference and it isn’t a fact. It’s a subjective hypothesis about a matter, based on the best information I have – with ignorance, limitations and blind spots built in. We are limited creatures. Limited by our senses, by the information available to us, by our ability to understand that information, by time and space. There is only so much you can learn in one lifetime. I believe there is vastly more that we will never know than anything we could possibly learn.

How could I possibly take my opinions so seriously? What troubles me isn’t that we have opinions. It’s when the opinions become our identities. When disagreeing with someone’s view feels like an attack on who they are. At that point the opinion can no longer be examined – it has to be defended.

My opinion is not my identity. I don’t put much stock in the idea of a fixed personal identity in the first place – but that’s a whole other opinion to dissect.

I believe that many of our strongly held opinions weren’t arrived at through any deep process of critical thought. They were inherited, learned, absorbed. We heard something, it fit with what we already believed, we adopted it, forgot we adopted it, and now it’s ours. People will fight over a difference in opinion. They will hurt people. They will hurt themselves. People have killed over a different opinion. And a lot of those opinions, if you trace them back far enough, came from somewhere they can’t even identify.

I’m not exempt. My opinions are suspect too – all of them, including everything I just said.

My Opinions

Where do we go when we die
And more importantly
When we die
Where do our opinions go
I hope that they live on and on
In the hearts of those whom we had the chance
To get up on our soapbox
And mouth off to

Please tell me
Tell me that it’s okay
To stay here holding on to
These words in mind for all time
I call my opinions

In my home the news plays day and night
And it shows me just exactly what the world is like
The newsmen speak so plain and truthfully
So you know it don’t surprise me
That when they talk they always seem to speak
My opinions
My opinions

Where oh where do we come from
And more importantly
Where do these opinions that I call my own come from
I don’t know I may never know
But what I do know Is that I seem to think much better than
A lot of other people

Please don’t tell me
You’ve got it figured out
When words fall out your mouth
Are silly words
That differ from my own
My opinions
My opinions

2026.03.15
World Is Abstruse

This song began with one image in the summer of 2021. I was driving past a local liquor store and I saw a woman getting out of her car. Across her car door was a very large sticker – almost as wide as the door itself – that said “TRUMP WON” I only saw her for a moment but I got an immediate sense of this person: confident, proud, unbothered. Everywhere she goes she is presenting that opinion to the world. I can’t think of a single opinion I hold that I would feel compelled to place across a vehicle for all to see at all times. That takes a certain kind of confidence. The first lines came to me in that moment.

Parked at the liquor store
Propoganda on her door
Proud to be salty and free
She’s not alone
Just one of many many
Living in a twisted fantasy
We can call it a lie but she’s living in a separate reality

From that image the song became an exploration of something I was seeing everywhere – people living in what felt like genuinely separate realities, unable to agree on even the most basic shared facts.

It got me thinking about perception itself. Take something as simple as color. Two people can point at the same object and both call it red. But is what I see when I look at red actually the same experience you have? What if the color you experience as red looks the way green looks to me, but we’ve both learned to call our experience by the same word? We’d have no way of knowing.

People aren’t simply lying. They aren’t simply deceived. On some level they are genuinely inhabiting a different reality. “We can call it a lie but she’s living in a separate reality.” If we can’t agree that red is red and blue is blue, how are we meant to find common ground?

Parked in the arm chair
Screaming into the chamber
Silently yet violently so
He’s not alone
Just one of many many
Acting out a twisted fantasy

The character in the second verse was written as the counterpart to the lady at the liquor store. Where she is out in the world, moving confidently with her ideology on display, he is stationary, screaming silently into an echo chamber. I was thinking about local Facebook groups, the constant infighting, people repeating the same talking points as everyone else on their team with complete confidence – like parrots. They don’t seem to be arriving at these positions through any independent process. They’re finding the newest opinion and repeating it loudly and proudly. “You can watch the monkey do, you can do just as they do.”

Underneath all of this is something I think about as the world of man versus the world as it is. Picture a flower on the side of the road. It wasn’t planted, it wasn’t watered, it doesn’t belong to anyone. It’s just a flower existing as it does for its lifetime – whether or not we describe it, name it, argue about it. That’s the world as it is. The world of man is the layer on top – the words, the symbols, the ideologies, the parties and clans. That layer only exists within human consciousness. It has no physical or material reality of its own. And yet people are dying and killing in the name of it. Seeking answers from the universe, asking the great unanswerable questions – that I can understand. But outsourcing understanding of reality to a pundit, an influencer, a politician is just dumb.

Speaking of dumb, I first titled this song “The World Is Obtuse.” I thought obtuse meant difficult to understand. It must have been almost a week of working on the song before I finally looked up the word and realized the word I was reaching for was abstruse. I was embarrassed. I realized – not only is the world abstruse, difficult to comprehend, but the word itself is difficult to understand. I was being obtuse.

The world is abstruse and humans are obtuse.

This song and My Opinions came from a similar place and around the same time. Songs written out of fatigue, frustration, disappointment, worry – from watching people I knew personally, friends and family, fighting online over talking points and ideological battles that seemed so removed from actual life.

Meanwhile, I was living alone with my dogs in the forest on the rural Oregon coast. Without need for any of that conflict in my day-to-day life. I was simply looking after myself, the dogs, the house and spending most my time in nature. It wasn’t until I opened Facebook or took a drive into town that any of that nonsense entered my world.

The World Is Abstruse

Parked at the liquor store
Propaganda on her door
Proud to be salty and free
She is not alone
Just one of many many
Living in a twisted fantasy

We can call it a lie but
She’s living in a separate reality
We can call it a lie but
She’s living in a separate reality

We have to imagine
As she’s cruising down the street
The grass may be blue while the sky is green
There’s no way to know it
It’s only a sight for her eyes
For her it may be red
For you it may be blue
Red lies blue lies it’s purple in disguise
For you it may be red For her it may be blue
What is the truth
The world is abstruse
How could it be so plain to see
Yet it’s lost on the majority
The world of men tells of parties and clans
But to me it’s all make believe
Look around
Life is here now

Parked in the arm chair
Screaming into the chamber
Silently yet violently so
He’s not alone
Just one of many many
Acting out a twisted fantasy

We can call it a lie but
He’s living in a separate reality
We can call it a lie but
He’s living in a separate reality

What is the truth
The world is abstruse
Seeking answers from the news
Yeah that’ll tie your noose
You can watch the monkey do
You can do just as they do
Cause it’s a man’s world
And we’re living in a zoo

Seeking answers from above
That I can understand
Seek the answer from a man
You’re being a dumbass
Seeking answers from above
That I can understand
Seek the answer from a man
And you’re being a dumbass

2026.03.15
Werns

I wrote the first verse of this song in January 2024. Just as the song suggests, I was chilling at the beach watching my dogs dig. I can picture it vividly – sitting on Battle Rock Beach on a beautiful January afternoon, the dogs were digging and just making me laugh. I was filled with joy as I am in the simple moments with them. I think I wrote down the first few lines just as they are, and within a few days I started singing and playing this funky guitar melody to those words. The original demo was me just working out the melody with no more than four lines. Originally I had an extended melody for the intro and ended up keeping a compressed version of it for the demo I recorded. From there I didn’t develop the idea at all until January 2026, despite the song making it to several lists of “need to finish” song ideas and several rounds of song-a-week groups.

This was a classic example of an idea that began without a premise – just a moment in time. As simple as the moment was and as simply as I wrote it down, I didn’t have a vision for the song beyond just describing that experience. I’ve lived half of my legal adult life with my dogs. They are such a major part of my life, as close to me as any human. Returning to develop this idea, I decided to dig into one of the most astonishing facts about the relationship between humans and canines: the sheer timescale.

Far from Chihuahuas, we relied on them for protection and warmth, for aid in hunting and tracking, for safety. I believe there is something quintessentially human about this relationship – our ancestors chose each other and evolved together. Dogs have been on every continent, they’ve been in space, they’ve been present in every civilization. And now here we are. We call them man’s best friend, our closest and longest standing evolved companions. I feel this when I’m with my dogs. I feel it when I’m not thinking about it, and when I do think about it sometimes I feel a rush of love and honor. I feel so human and so connected to our history, our ancestors. I cherish my dogs. We carry them to the day they pass and carry them with us until our time comes. As we wander the beaches and forests of Oregon, and beyond – they live the majority of their days in the wild and spend little time behind fences, collar and leash. Often on our excursions we don’t see another human. Like our ancestors wandering together side by side.

This song became a tribute not just to my dogs who I adore, but a statement on the humility I feel in their presence – acknowledging our ancient past together.

P.S. The title is just one of dozens of silly names I’ve arrived at to call my dogs.

“Werns”
Chilling at the beach
Watching my dogs digging
A face shaped hole then they dive right in
They got me laughing

They give me a goofy sandy look
Their tails wag in the breeze
The bond we share is an ancient one
We’ve been together so long

Before we named our Gods
We had dogs
Before we wrote, before we spoke
Any language known today

They kept us safe out on the hunt
They kept us warm in the cave
We shared our food and buried their dead
They’ve been family for so long

Before we planted seeds
Before we built cities
From the cave to outer space
We’ve come a long way together

Chilling at the beach
Watching my dogs digging
The bond we share is an ancient one
Tens of thousands of years long

2026.03.13
Fallen Giant

This song has a long history. The first demos date back to 2017. At this point I cannot remember what I was initially writing about, but the essence of the original demo remains somewhat in Fallen Giant – particularly in the instrumental section before the second verse and the outro.

For years the song sat unfinished. It made it onto several lists of ideas to return to and through several rounds of song-a-week groups without ever getting developed. I never cared enough for it to record a full demo. Then in the spring of 2025 I was traveling the US with my dogs and at the end of a long journey we spent the last few days slowly making our way up the California coast, taking quality time amongst the redwoods of Humboldt and Del Norte counties. It was on a hike through the redwoods that we came across the fallen giant that inspired this final iteration of the song. I wrote some of my thoughts down at the time:

I was hiking through the California coastal redwoods and came upon a fallen giant. The root system alone was massive – way bigger than me. I marveled at it at first, then walked around the side to see the actual tree, which must have fallen many years ago as its topside was completely covered with ferns, trees, clovers, moss. This tree must have lived at least a thousand years and now in death so much life springs forth – a whole new world growing off its back, with many plants and probably insects and other animals living their lives on and around the corpse of this giant.

All the nutrients it had acquired in its very long life are released into the ecosystem to feed this new life. It’s beautiful. When we pass we may not be hundreds of feet tall and thousands of years old but the same fate awaits us.

The bodies we inhabit, the seat of our ego and consciousness, will cease to exist in the static form we know and this transfer of energy and life will begin. The materials that make us up will be broken down and offered up to the environment. And that forward motion of life continues. I believe this is what reincarnation truly is. Compared to a lot of the myths that we’ve known in human history maybe it seems a little anticlimactic or dissatisfying. But it is true. If we decide that all we are is what is being projected from our brains then I don’t think there is anything for us after death. But if we are to identify ourselves with and recognize that we are not separate – that there is no us without our environment – then we can understand that the matter that makes us up is eternal. We will lose our sense of consciousness as we’ve known it, the human ego, memories, all of it will be gone. But what we are on the deepest physical level will remain in some form for longer than the redwood stood. Don’t be confused – just because the brain will cease to exist doesn’t mean it’s all for nothing. Because it’s happening just this once, here and now, it means so much more. We exist.

Later, during the song-a-week group in the fall of 2025, I started to revisit the tune – which I had previously called Heaven Is Wasted – and was reminded of this new perspective and lesson from the redwood tree on the physical reincarnation of the body. I never really liked the overall lyrics and perspective in the previous version and felt this was something much more interesting and worth exploring. I took my writings from the spring and adapted them to make up the first verses.

During this time I was visiting Crescent City weekly and taking regular trips to the redwoods around Highway 199 and a couple of trips up the Chetco River to the redwood groves in Oregon. I was searching for other fallen redwoods to sit with and contemplate and write on. I found that I wasn’t writing a lot during those visits – instead I was just reveling in their presence. I didn’t feel too inspired to write anymore on the subject at that point, and although I managed to write the middle section in that time, I didn’t know where the song would go. I sat and wrote the last verse amongst the redwoods in early February 2026 and everything was fleshed out and finalized during the final recording session.

These days I’ve been splitting my time between Del Norte and Curry Counties, spending time with the redwoods as often as possible.

In the redwood forest
I find a fallen giant
Whose roots tower over me
Once touched the sky
Now resting at my feet

I walk around to take a look
At the body of an ancient being
A whole new world grows on it’s back
And I’m humbled

It must have lived a thousand years or more
And now in death it bursts with
Moss and ferns
Slugs, birds, berries and clovers
Salamanders, witches butter
So much life and so much color

I won’t live a thousand years
I won’t grow 400 feet
I don’t know when I’ll fall
But when I do, I know what awaits me

Like the fallen giant
I will rest where I once stood
All the little bits that made me up
Will break down, go back to the earth
And carry on
Forever and ever
Carry on
Forever and ever

2026.03.13
Maytag Land

The song was mostly composed, arranged, and recorded within my van amidst travels down to Los Angeles in February 2026.

The song began from a Reddit prompt: “Write a song about the happy land where socks are escaping to. But try to write it in a minor key, and add some twist.”

It’s rare that I write from a prompt but I always appreciate prompt writing for pushing me to write something that otherwise most likely never would have been considered. It provides a kind of safe distance from what I’m writing – I don’t have to feel too attached. It’s a pure creative exercise with just enough structure to give me a direction and enough flexibility to be creative within it.

I found this particular prompt interesting and a bit curious. I struggled at first to find an approach that made sense to me. I started writing about the many socks without pairs I’ve got in a drawer and a few other things that felt too concrete. Eventually I removed myself from the story and focused instead on it being a sort of recruitment song – from the socks to the listener. As I wrote those lines I started to view them as refugees, escaping a harsh reality to a place outside of time where they will not be used and abused, ripped up, chewed up and thrown away. For the darker twist, I wrote that there’s only one way in and no way out.

As a jumping off point I started from visualizing the laundry room at my house, which was once the studio, but now the cat room with, like the song says, litter boxes and a catio door.

This is an example of a song where I essentially wrote most of it away from the instrument. I started with the lyrics and then began to hear them set to a melody. The majority of the melodies were composed without even touching a guitar – I sang them into a voice note while driving. It was my second night on the road, waiting out a storm near Bakersfield, where I was set up in the van working out the melodies and harmonizing them on guitar.

I had no concrete idea for a musical arrangement at that point. I kind of imagined it being arranged for piano, or sort of toy piano – almost like a song that would be in a children’s show. But ultimately the song took on a more straightforward guitar and vocal arrangement. The melody was set before I even touched the guitar though. There are several different movements in the song and everything was driven by this changing melody.

Here’s the response I got from the Redditor who gave me the prompt:

“This is GREAT! Cool 70s-like sound, carefree and well-done lyrics! ‘Join us in the dryer and shut the door behind you’ 😅 And the dryer sound in the end. A fantastic choice. Thank you for making my prompt into something so nice! 😊”

I gave them a counter prompt in return: Write a song that tells a story in reverse chronological order – starting with the end, then the middle, ending with the beginning.

I’d like to do something with that eventually. But for now, here’s Maytag Land.

There’s a place
Down the hall way
Past the litter box and catio door

A magic space
There’s only one way
In and no way out

Where all is warm
And all is fluff
Theres treasure there
And softness in the air

Everyone’s an individual
Not a single pair
And you can join us there

In Maytag land
Come join our clan
We’ll throw a sock party for you
Be one of us
We are not lost
We have each other

Just get into the dryer
And shut the door behind you
Those socks, you thought were lost?
We’ll reunite you
The bills and coins that disappeared are waiting for you
Your guitar pick?
We got that too
You can play a little doodle loo

In Maytag land
Come join our band
We’ll play a sock party with you
Be one of us
Join our chorus
We’ll sing together

La la la

In maytag land
Time sits still
We don’t grow old
And don’t grow holes
Never stepped on never trashed
Never ripped up by the cats
We’ve left the cold hard world behind
And we can’t go back

Come join us in the dryer
And shut the door behind you

2026.03.13
March [2024]

March is a collection of songs and videos self-produced between February and April 2024, beginning at home in Oregon and continuing as I traveled between Oregon, Hawaii, mainland Australia, and Tasmania.

These tracks cover a span of six years and a distance of 8,000 miles. Some took months of creative teeth-pulling to put together. Others were written and recorded in a few hours — one in the moment of creation. Recorded across states and continents, across different moods and seasons and lifetimes. Edited, mixed and arranged on buses, planes, in forests, cliff sides, spare bedrooms, a van, a dome, and probably more odd spaces that escape me now. They are united in that they were completed in the month of March.

Everything you hear and see was self-produced. The audio was mastered and videos re-cut for final release in April 2024, shortly after joining a recording session with some crazy hippies at MONA Museum’s Frying Pan Studios in Tasmania.

1. Acaso

Built around “Temple City Theme,” a piece of music written on the road in 2014 and dedicated to the San Gabriel Valley suburb where I grew up. The song became a reflection on returning home after years of travel to help my family through the sale of my childhood home and my parents’ separation – and the ongoing search for new homes that followed. Written during the first song-a-week challenge, fall 2023. Full entry and lyrics →

2. Scroll Hole

A short song about a recurring experience: reaching for the phone to open the tuner app and emerging twenty minutes later from an Instagram spiral with nothing to show for it. Written in March 2024, recorded and filmed in the guest room of my friend Alex’s family home in Adelaide, South Australia – an all-nighter with my face buried in a camera lens. Full entry and lyrics →

3. Sweet Sleep

An instrumental piece from a series of horn-driven compositions I call Dokie Okie. Cut together with video from a rare snow day at home in Port Orford – the snowfall lasted about twenty minutes, but I grabbed the camera and ran through every room shooting until it stopped. Full entry →

4. Gutter Baby

A character study drawn from people I met traveling around Montreal, Humboldt, and Mendocino counties, with roots in a dusty notebook from 2014-2015 when I was hitchhiking the states heavy. An amalgamation of stories heard on the street, some of my own experiences, and a hard-won happy ending. First demo completed January 2024 during a song-a-week challenge. Full entry and lyrics →

5. Cloudsurf

A beat made with the Jamstik MIDI guitar, cut to a rainy night drive into Old Town Bandon, OR.

6. Somewhere New

Written five years before the March release, this one captures the feeling of marching into the unknown. Shot in the Canary Islands — La Palma and Tenerife, the home island of my great-grandfather.

7. Miles Away

Written on a drive home along the southern Oregon coast, coming around the bend at Humbug Mountain when the ocean suddenly snapped me back into the present. A song about autopilot — all the time that passes while you’re somewhere else. Recorded at sunset on the cliffs at Sister’s Rock, playing until it got dark and cold. Full entry and lyrics →

8. Real Life

Written and recorded on a day of hitchhiking outside of Swansea, Tasmania. A sketch that became a song about sitting with uncertainty and staying open to what it brings.

9. Oahu Noodles

Two improvisations recorded on the porch of a hostel on the north shore of Oahu, the morning of my last day on the island. Recorded guitar and synth into a handheld recorder through headphones until the batteries died- caught a flight to Sydney that afternoon. Full entry →

10. Beaten Track

The tale of a relationship going from a joy ride to a runaway hell ride. The wavy keys are a Jamstik running through a borrowed Nord Stage 3.

11. Can’t Abide

A song about choosing time over money, work that means something over work that pays. Written in a couple of hours, finished before I even knew it. Full entry, video and lyrics →

12. Been Missin

he sister song to Dust. Written after a two-hour phone call with an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in years, walking the dogs on the beach in the sun. About the moment the reconnection finally happens and you discover that though much has changed, much is the same. Full entry and lyrics →

That’s all folks! March wasn’t necessarily planned as an ‘album’ – I simply set out to release everything I finished within the span of a month (or two) and these were the songs and videos I managed to finish in that time. I’m certain some of these songs will find new life in future arrangements, recordings and releases. Stay tuned!

2026.03.01
Only The Lucky Grow Old

This song was written during the first week of the fall 2025 songwriting group. I was already making progress on another song when this one came to me very quickly one night. I remember having a long day and getting very sick from some sort of caffeinated beverage in the evening. I was running sound at our local venue and sitting at the bar after the show when I had a conversation with an older man – he was at least twice my age. He said jokingly at some point, “I hope I stay young forever.”

In that moment I felt three things at once: the awareness of my own youth sitting there next to him – I was just 33 years old. Then the awareness of friends who didn’t live much longer than I have, or barely made it past 33. Then the awareness that he was once my age and lived many more years that for me are probable at best, not guaranteed. I felt almost envious in that moment, realizing that I may have the gift of youth in his eyes, but he had the gift of time – time that some friends did not have, and I may not have. With all of this in mind, I replied, “Only the lucky grow old.” As soon as the phrase came to my mind and I spoke those words, I had this feeling: “That’s a good line!”

After we wrapped up that conversation, I made my way home and the closer I got to the house, the more the caffeine-induced headache intensified. During that short drive, the melody and lines just started coming to me one after the other, and I sang them into my phone as I climbed up the hill. As soon as I got into the house and fed the dogs and cats, I retreated to my room where I shut the door and shut off all the lights. With this headache pounding, I sat down and worked out the entire song in the dark, line by line, working towards the line that inspired the whole thing.

I was writing about all the things that were weighing heavy on my mind at that time: struggling financially, in serious debt, drowning under the weight of many responsibilities, while also looking at losing essential benefits, and all the while reflecting on the young friends who have lost everything and my own feelings of guilt and regret. The song ended up taking an ironic position – we are the lucky ones who are still here, still breathing, still going, growing older – yet we’re here spending our precious luck stressing about survival.

After finishing the last lines, I laid down and slept for 10 hours.

One more letter
Written halfway
Crumbled up
Thrown away
Just a taste to tease the heart ache

If there’s a cure
I ain’t gonna find it
I never called back
My therapist
When they canceled twice
I tossed their card away

Come new years I won’t be insured
Word came down from the billionaires
They won’t keep floating a broke down bum like me
When I shoulda been working I was on the road
I came home when I had nowhere else to go
I’ve gone broke again seeing how far I could bend

That little squiggle scratched on the line
On paper with the land and the man
My name is not my name but if I don’t pay
They could take it all away
Take it all away

I miss the simple days
I miss sleeping on the side of the road
I miss having no home no car no guitars no phone

If I could go back
I’d gather up the letters I tossed
Package them and send em to the friends I’ve lost
I had one chance and I’ve never been bold
Only the lucky grow old

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

One last thing I would like to share about this song is a recording from my good friend Liam Warden, who sent me a piano and vocal rendition just days after I first recorded it and sent it to him. I prefer his version to my own, and it made me appreciate the song so much more.

2026.02.28
Miles Away
For several years I worked with the county providing audiovisual services – mainly during their routine business meetings. Commissioner meetings, workshops, budget committees. Any instance where the elected officials were set to discuss and vote on county business, I would be there making sure everything was captured on video and audio and streamed live to the public. There were periods where this was the most consistent money gig I had going.

The commute was nearly 30 miles each way between Port Orford and Gold Beach – coastal highway the whole way, passing multiple state parks, untouched beaches, cliffs dropping straight into the Pacific. It should have been one of the more scenic commutes imaginable.

I am a night owl and often struggled to balance weeks of late nights with a sudden 8 AM meeting with the commissioners. I would find myself sleep deprived on the way there and on the way home, not the best state to be working or traveling in. By the later part of my time with the county I was often running on autopilot – multitasking through the meetings themselves, working on music mixes or editing videos with the audio feed in one ear, sometimes taking long phone calls or leaving voice messages to friends while the meeting ran in the background. On tired drives home I might be in a total state of detachment, spaced out in far away sleepy thoughts. The drive would pass and I’d find myself home before I even knew it.

There were days I felt I took that drive for granted entirely – all those breathtaking views of the wild Pacific just passing by unnoticed. Often enough I would pull over and take a moment to calibrate. Just feeling the breeze, looking out to the endless ocean, reminding myself – this is it. Sometimes I’d run out onto the beach or stand at the top of the cliffs above the crashing waves. Other times I’d stop at Sister’s Rock and walk out of sight of the highway and just sit and breathe.

The song began on one of those drives home. I was coming around the south end of Humbug Mountain – winding roads where long straight stretches suddenly morph into tight turns, speed signs, roadside memorials reminding you to slow down and be careful. It was that passage that snapped me back one day. I had awakened in paradise. Coming around the last bend the ocean came back into view and the sky was brilliant. It became so clear in that moment that I’d been on autopilot – the whole drive up until that point had passed in a flash without me really noticing the sky or the sea. The song just started coming and I started singing – lately I’ve been losing my sense, I’m here sitting at the driver’s wheel but I’m miles miles away.

The mortality thread in the song wasn’t entirely conscious at the time. All the roads with their twist and turns all leading to the same place. Here today we’re not here to stay. I’ll be there soon, I’ll be right back here on the one track. Looking back I think the connection was more subconscious – that great shock of presence, suddenly feeling so alive and aware, carries with it the recognition of how much time passes while you’re somewhere else. Going in and out of presence felt connected to going in and out of consciousness, in and out of life itself. To be drifted away in thought is still being alive, but in a sense it’s not really living.

This song was something of a precursor to Body, written at least a couple of years before it. Both songs circle the same territory – the pattern of spending so much time outside of presence, outside of the body, occupied in thought and disconnected from the environment. Body was a more direct reckoning with that. Miles Away was where the realization first started to surface.

The recording came during a day I spent experimenting with a compact setup for capturing video and audio while traveling – a kind of proof of concept for how I might document performances on the road. I stopped at a few locations, dealt with some overexposure issues and audio problems along the way. My last stop just before sunset was Sister’s Rock. I played through a few songs up on the cliffside as it got cold and the light faded, playing until almost dark. It was one of the last takes and the most usable. Sister’s Rock is one of my favorite stops along that drive – I’ll often go there at night with the dogs, especially on a stormy or moonlit night when I can hike out to the edge of the cliffs and down to the beaches without a flashlight. I’ve written and finished songs there more than once. It felt like the right place for this one.
```
"Miles Away"

Lately I've been losing my sense
I'm here sitting at the driver's wheel
But I'm miles
Miles away

All the roads with their twist and turns
All leading to the same place

Back in the seat, looking all around me
I can't believe I'm almost halfway home
Ocean meets the sky
Great stars shine their light
My body is here in paradise
But I'm miles
Miles away
Miles away from here

We're here today we're not here to stay
And I just can't believe it
All the years all the folks
They're just passing by
I'll be there soon
I'll be right back here on the one track
I'll be there soon
I'll be right back here on the one track

Lately I've been losing my sense
I'm here strumming on this (pink) guitar
But I'm miles
Miles away from here
```
2025.09.30