coastal alt/indie rock

​​Field Notes​​

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“The Dunes” came out of what I think of as the Sausalito sessions: New Year’s weekend, 2022, looking across the bay toward San Francisco with a guitar, a laptop, and a strange little burst of creative weather moving through the room.

 

I spent most of one day writing to drum beats, then shifted into writing from sounds. I would pull up a guitar effect, play for a while, and wait to see if anything in it made me lean forward. If it did, I followed it.

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That weekend, I wrote eighteen complete pieces of music. That is not normal for me. I might come away from a weekend with a few riffs, a verse idea, a chorus shape, or some promising fragments. But these were full tracks, full musical worlds, and none of them had words yet. They were all instrumentals, built from impulse, texture, and momentum.

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“The Dunes” was one of those pieces. I remember finding this ambient guitar sound with a lot of reverb, and the moment I started playing, the whole thing seemed to appear. I played the first part in what I think was basically one take. Then I flipped to another track, panned it to the other side, and played a second guitar part with a different effect. Then I added a third part in the center, put some drums under it, and suddenly there it was: this melancholy, drifting, haunted little landscape.

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At that point, it had no title and no lyric. But when I got back to Monterey, I already knew where the song lived.

 

From our place there, we look out over the dunes that run along the beach from Surf Way up past what used to be called The Tides, toward Marina, Moss Landing, and beyond. Those dunes are protected, which means they are always there but never quite the same. Sunrise, sunset, rain, fog, rainbows, wind, waves breaking beyond them — they change by the hour. They can look soft and golden one minute, then cold and dangerous the next. They are beautiful in a way that does not ask to be comforting.

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I think that image had already planted itself in me before the music appeared in Sausalito. Once I heard the tone of the track, it naturally pulled me back to those dunes. The music was not cheerful. It had movement, but it also had a kind of ache in it. So instead of singing a polished melody, I started speaking into it: “We went to Lover’s Beach, you said you wanted to swim / On land you were patient, but in the sea you took me in.”

 

Then came the chorus: “They found my love in the dunes…”

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I’ll be honest: I did not know exactly what that meant when I sang it. I still do not feel the need to pin it down too tightly. But it clearly suggested that this was not a happy postcard from the coast. It was a song about beauty, danger, attraction, and loss.

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I have a number of friends who love the ocean but have a complicated relationship with it. They love the sound, the view, the air, the shimmer, the waves from a distance — but not necessarily the salt, the sand, the cold, the undertow, or the feeling of being knocked down by something much larger than themselves.

 

That tension found its way into the lyric: someone drawn to the sea, but not entirely at peace with it.

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At the end of the song, I added a wordless howl. I think I originally imagined it as a placeholder for some future lyric or guitar solo, but it seemed to say what words could not. So it stayed.

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That is “The Dunes”: a song born in Sausalito, claimed by Monterey, and shaped by the strange truth that the coast can be both invitation and warning. Every time I look over those dunes, the song comes back to me.​

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