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Latest posts
- Week 2: Don’t Waste Daylight
- Week 1: Mount Baldy
- Finger Wizard, THE BAND!
- Six Week Songwriting Challenge Fall 2026
- The Challenge: July 2018 Pt. 2 – Songs 14-27
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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
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Sweet Sleep
This piece originated in the winter of 2023. I got into writing a series of instrumental pieces based around horn parts – the collection of songs that I file under the name Dokie Okie. Eventually, I’d like to produce the songs properly with a full band and live horn arrangements, but for now they all exist as MIDI demos.
I brought this one together and included it on the March collection after shooting video on an elusive snow day at my home in Port Orford. The snowfall only lasted about 20 minutes, but being a desert child, it was magical nonetheless. As soon as the snow started falling, the house started buzzing – in fact, I believe it was my brother’s first time seeing snowfall. I grabbed my camera as quickly as I could and ran around shooting from every room and window around the house. Once the fall stopped, I got a few more shots outside.
I wanted to cut the video to some music and felt this track fit, so I did a little bit of arranging, condensed the track, and put it together in the month of March.
We’re not quite out of summer at the time of writing this, but I look forward to the change of seasons and the next elusive snow day.
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Oahu Noodles
“Oahu Noodles” is a track made up of couple of improvisations I recorded on the porch of Backpackers Vacation Inn & Hostel on the north side of Oahu, Hawaii. The first week of March 2024, I was making my way to Australia for the first time and saw flights that transferred at Honolulu airport, so I decided to book a 4 night layover, rent a car and explore Oahu for a few days.
Through couchsurfing I had lined up a sweet spot to stay on a small boat during my visit, but the day before I arrived the stay fell through. In between a bus trip across Oregon and a couple flights over I was frantically trying to find another couchsurfing situation, researching places I might be able to sleep safely in the rental car (which is illegal and highly discouraged on Oahu!), I was able to stay for the night of my arrival with some coast guard dudes but finally ended up booking a hostel on the north side for the rest of my stay. I was bummed at first but it ended up being a great landing and shaped the trajectory of my entire trip.
One of my roommates at the hostel was a folk musician who, nearly 50 years earlier, had nearly slid to his death while hiking a nearby trail. He told me that besides two major heart attacks he had later in life, that fall was the closest he had come to death. He told me that he slid and slid and slid until he came to the edge of a ridge with a perilous drop below. He was able to walk along the ridge, which formed a nice natural trail. Eventually, he found his way back to civilization, but that spot stuck with him.
Now here he was in his early 70s, retired from his trade, returning for the second year to stay for a month and try to find the site of his near-death experience. Each day he would go off to hike and search for this elusive ridge. He was nearing the end of his trip and told me that if he didn’t find it this time, he’d be coming back the next year to continue his search. While he was out searching for a needle in a haystack, I was trying to get lost – driving around, meeting many dead-end roads, gates, fences, trespassing signs and so on. In hindsight, I should’ve tagged along with him, but I was content wandering around the island, swimming, eating and playing guitar in the sun, and on a rainy day – shooting video as I made my way around the island. I later cut the video to the “noodles”:
One evening we threw together an impromptu open mic out on the porch. We started with only a cheap hostel guitar, which I drove across the island to buy strings for, cleaned up, strung up and tuned up. Eventually, with some imagination, I managed to set up an electric guitar, vocal and little synthesizer amplified with my laptop and a Bluetooth speaker. Hostel folks came by the porch to hang out, listen, sing, and jam.
One of the musicians who came by was a fella named Dave Lee, a New Zealand-born musician who had been living in Tasmania for almost a decade. He came out to Hawaii for a surfing trip and joined us on the porch where we jammed, swapped tunes and riffs, and had an all-around good time. Dave plays bass in a Tassie band called Lennon Wells. Our meeting inadvertently directed my trip, as just a week later I would find myself in South Australia, looking for leads and opportunities to get involved with events across Australia when I saw that Lennon Wells was playing a small festival in Tasmania called Echo Fest. I reached out to the festival and offered my help, they invited me along straight away. From one island to the next, Oahu to Tasmania.
The noodles of “Oahu Noodles” were recorded on the porch, the morning of my last day on the island. I took my little guitar/synth rig and ran it into a handheld recorder, along with my phone feeding basic drum tracks. I played through headphones until the recorder batteries died. I would be flying out to Sydney that afternoon, so this was my last chance to capture something from the island. I offered to give another roommate a ride to the airport before my flight, and we spent the afternoon driving across the island with just enough time for a waterfall hike, pictured above and below.
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Scroll Hole/Alex
“Scroll Hole”
I like short songs. I don’t like being addicted to the phone. If I’m going to be addicted to the phone I might as well make short songs about it. This is based on true, recurring events. This ditty tells the story of reaching for my phone to perform a simple task (tuning a guitar) and mindlessly getting lost scrolling instagram. I wrote the song in March 2024, finishing the recording and shot the video while staying in the guestroom of my friend and his mum’s house in the suburbs of Adelaide, South Australia. While they were off working I was in the dark with my face buried in a camera lens, experimenting with the video edits to pull off what I saw in my head. Watch the video here:
I’m reaching to do something quick and simple on my phone
Then suddenly
I get lost
In a hole as I scroll I have no control at all
I’m sinking
Precious fleeting
Moments of my life
That I’ll never get back
I can’t recall
A single thing that I was just looking atI never close this app with more than
I had when I opened itWhere was I at
Oh that’s right
All I was trying to do was open up the tuner appLISTEN
Every video, every recording and every day is a fresh experiment. From the album “March 2024” available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. “March 2024” is a collection of songs that reflect my life and travels. Recorded across various states and continents, the sounds and images for the album cover a span of six years and 11,000 miles.
https://linktr.ee/ericprincessdragonAlex
I will add some additional notes to fill in some details of the trip from Oahu onto Tassie. I will also take a detour to talk about my good friend Alex and some of our adventures around the globe.
I arrived in Australia on March 12, just two days before my birthday, beginning a one-year working holiday visa. I flew on a one-way ticket with more luggage and gear than I had ever traveled with before. I wanted to be ready for a whole range of possible gig/recording/photo/video scenarios and packed enough gear to perform as a solo act, take photos & videos in different scenarios, record myself or a full band, put on an impromptu hostel porch open mic and more. Between the guitar, backpack, and big suitcase, it was too much to comfortably lug around a city, on buses, trains, or the side of the road – too much even to easily stash at a hostel. I had planned to purchase a vehicle as soon as I arrived and continue my adventure into the unknown. The only step of the trip I had figured out was the very first: arrival in Adelaide and a stay with my longtime friend and travel buddy Alex.
Alex is a multi-talented fella and all around sweet heart. He is a photographer, actor, ASMR artist and after living and traveling around the world for years has settled back into his home in Adelaide working for VFX company Rising Sun Pictures.We first met in the winter of 2013 when I was working in Granada, Spain at a hostel called Makuto. He came in as a guest while touring Europe and we hit it off, wandering the cobblestone city, sharing travel stories, and hiking out early one morning to catch the sunrise over La Alhambra.
I was nearing the end of my stint in Granada and nearly ready to head to Berlin for Christmas & New Years. As it turned out, Berlin was one of Alex’s next stops and our visits would overlap. Just a week or two later we met up to spend more quality time wandering, this time in the grittier urban setting of Berlin. One of the highlights from that visit was attending an event in the basement of a bookstore – a storytelling open mic where everyone was encouraged to get up and tell an improvised story on a particular theme. That night the theme was “family.”
We both joined the audience and told our stories. I spoke about my grandparents and what I knew of their migrations from Cuba & Mexico, of my paternal grandfather working in forced labor camps operated by the new Cuban government under Fidel Castro. I spoke of my maternal grandparents being robbed by the “coyotes” they hired to take them across the border and my mother eventually crossing into the US underneath the seat of a car as a child. And I spoke of my life and travels being a walk in the park in comparison to the experiences they endured.
After Berlin we went our separate ways, keeping in touch but living worlds away, both of us traveling regularly over those next years. Eventually, in 2016, Alex’s travels brought him to North America and he came to visit me in LA. I was living in San Bernardino County at a warehouse at the time – a condemned building which just a year or so later would be demolished without a trace, but at that time provided refuge for a large cast of artists, musicians, hippies, stoners, and weirdos. Me being one of the all-those-things. We went wandering around the area from the warehouse, my childhood home (Acaso) out to downtown LA where we drove past tent cities and looked over the skyline. Alex returned to the US once again in 2018 and our adventures continued around my new home in Oregon. Across over a decade we have met up on three continents in four countries.
Back to 2024: I felt like family coming to stay with Alex and his mum, an intelligent and hilarious woman from South Africa. We shared lots of interesting conversations and she took an active interest in helping me figure out my next move. When I first got the inkling to go to Tasmania, she was very encouraging, recounting the itinerary of her honeymoon trip around Tassie while I saved the locations of all her favorite places on the map. I remember just after that conversation, finding Frying Pan Studios while researching Tasmania and being overcome with a sense that I must go there and record. Tasmania was pulling me in.
I only stayed about a week in Adelaide, and Alex was working for much of that week, but we found time to do plenty of wandering around Adelaide and take a trip along the coast of South Australia, share meals with his family, catch some comedy at Adelaide Fringe and share plenty of d&m (deep and meaningful conversations) along the way. Here are some photos taken on film. I shot the photo of him, and he the photos of me.
Also within that week I managed to fit in an all nighter, staying up past sunrise working on the Scroll Hole video. The song was written just before I left for Australia, but I recorded it, shot the video and mixed/edited everything right there in Alex’s family home.
On March 20th, after a quality stay in Adelaide, I was off for Hobart. -
Acaso
From the March album – originally written Fall 2023
“Acaso” came together during one of the most emotionally intensive periods of my songwriting life, built around a piece of music I’d been playing with for years. It was 2014 when I returned to the states after over a year of traveling abroad – this was a piece I’d begun playing on the road but finalized and decided to dedicate to the San Gabriel Valley suburb where I grew up. I called it “Temple City Theme.” Here’s a recording of the piece I did with my friend Stephen Reed (of the brilliant band Xinxin) on drums:
The Songwriting Challenge
“Acaso” was written in fall 2023 during the first round of a new songwriting group led by Tim Bulster (of Tiller of The Moon – check out The Songwriting Mind episode with this talented musician). We committed to eight weeks of writing a song per week, recording demos and sharing them with the group. This became the first of four challenges we’d complete between fall 2023 and winter 2024.
Here’s “Acaso” as originally submitted to the song-a-week group:
(Original demo recording)
Back in 2017, my childhood home in Temple City had been sold and my parents separated at long last. The anchor that had tethered a broken, unhappy family was finally cut loose.
“Acaso” became my reflection on that time and process – from a free life on the road to returning “home” to serve my family through this transition and see them through to the other side. Eventually leaving to find new homes where the search and quest to claim spaces for ourselves continues.
Here’s the version released with the collection of songs “March” performed live in my living room.
Video:
The unknowns been good to me
Much better friend than certainty
I traveled long and I traveled far
Found myself across the world
Now I got a call I been waiting for
It’s time to go back homeHey it’s okay
To finish what you started
It’s run its course
I know we’re all exhausted
Don’t fret we’ll be alright
This days been coming all our lives
No more tears no more fights
Just step through the door
Gotta go back home
For the last timeAt home I got a role to play
Our folks are going their separate ways
It got so bad they can’t speak
Their voices move through me
It ain’t fun but it’s gotta get done
If we’re gonna move onAll packed up and I’m the last one out
Last chord needing cutting was this house
Where we were born where we grew old
What stood between us and the cold
This broken home is all we’ve ever known
But it’s time we close the door
We’re gonna find new homesEvery video, every recording and every day is a fresh experiment. From the album “March 2024” available on Bandcamp and all streaming platforms. “March 2024” is a collection of songs that reflect my life and travels. Recorded across various states and continents, the sounds and images for the album cover a span of six years and 11,000 miles.
https://linktr.ee/ericprincessdragon