ericprincessdragon

Tag: oregon

  • 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

  • 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

  • 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

  • Fallen Giant

    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

  • 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 at

    I never close this app with more than
    I had when I opened it

    Where was I at
    Oh that’s right
    All I was trying to do was open up the tuner app

    LISTEN


    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/ericprincessdragon

    Alex

    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.