coastal alt/indie rock

​​Field Notes​​

 

San Juan Bautista sits less than an hour south of San Jose, not far from Monterey, and it is exactly the kind of place I should have taken every visiting friend who ever asked, “What does old California feel like?” Yet it took decades for me to get there.

 

It's a small mission town, only a few blocks really, but it carries a whole mythology in its streets. Western storefronts. Antique shops. A mission at the center. Dust, gardens, courtyards, bells.

Even Hitchcock knew what was there; a key scene from Vertigo was filmed near the mission.

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Angie and I first went there almost by accident, just a side trip for lunch. We thought we might spend an hour. Instead, we lost half a day wandering the town, exploring the mission, talking with a gardener who clearly loved the grounds, and taking pictures and video of a place that felt suspended between California history and dream logic. I came back to San Jose, but - lyrically, anyway - couldn't leave it behind.

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I knew there was a song there, but not much rhymes with "Bautista". Eventually, I found my way to “barista.” I had only known the word in the modern coffeehouse sense, but some searching gave me enough historical permission to use it more broadly, closer to a bartender or server. That was all I needed. The chorus arrived in the backyard while I was strumming:

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“I don’t know why I left that barista
At the mission San Juan Bautista…”

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From there, the story darkened. It became a Western romance gone wrong, with a narrator who promises to meet a young woman at the mission door and then abandons her. She needed a name, and “Magdalena” came from a real memory.

 

When I first moved to California, I knew a Latina coworker named Magdalena, though everyone called her Maggie. We talked quite a bit at work. One year she went to Mexico to visit family and never came back. No one seemed to know why. That disappearance stayed with me, and her name found its way into the song.

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The Magdalena in “Western Winds” is fictional, of course, but she carries that same sense of vanishing into rumor. “Now she’s gone, I hear she’s chasing sins on Western winds.” Once I gave her that fate, I had to give the narrator his sins too. The song is not only about what happens to her; it is about what he knows he did, and what he has to live with.

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A few months after that first visit, Angie and I went back. We wanted another meal at the Mexican restaurant, and I also wanted to soak in the place again while the song was forming. Our waitress that day was dressed traditionally, and in my mind she became Magdalena. Something about her presence locked the character into place. Later, when I worked with AI imagery for the song video, that waitress became the visual seed.

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Musically, the song always had a Western strum, but it did not fully come alive until I added the mission bells.

 

Around that time, I had been in Ann Arbor on business and had toured the university’s bell tower, where I got to play a carillon. Those bells stayed in my head. Back home, I found a carillon plugin and layered it into the chorus. Suddenly the song had its ghost. It had the mission. It had the thing it had been missing.

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I shared the track in a production class full of country songwriters, saying, “I’m not a country-western writer, but I’d love your feedback.”

 

One of them replied after hearing the song, “You’re not country, but you definitely are Western.”

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That has stayed with me. I think “Western Winds” may be exactly that: not country, but Western. A ghost story in mission bells. A love song with dust on its boots. A confession carried away by the wind.

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