Too much of my time, my internal mental time, has been devoted to the kind of indecisive analysis-paralysis that originally motivated the fragment that this song started as, one played briefly by relative as "breathe or die" and then a favorite that I played and recorded in various ways over the years. Perhaps ironically, the fragment hung around the interlude, which originally was just a jumble of half phrases, repeated…

All this time..
Am I scared that I…
Should I run or stay…
Is it already too late…
All this time…
Have I made up my mind…
Is it fear or fight…
Do I breathe or die?

One night in 2022 I was travelling abroad, found myself wandering the streets of Dublin all night, an early flight to catch the next day to come home. When I was younger and traveling, I would often throw caution to the wind, not bother with a hotel, and just hike the city all night… I decided to make good on that tradition on this trip.

There was a young woman I was seeing at the time who has spiritual connections that I've only gotten a glimpse of, but they reminded me of my own connectedness as a younger person, and in our encounters, there were frequently moments of deep intensity that I'm not sure I could do justice to in words. She and I had been conversing a bit over text messages during this trip and she was helping me start to see what I wanted.

Maybe that seems too broad, but "What do I want?" has always been a difficult question for me to answer. I can go very abstract – I want to be challenged, I want to feel satisfied, I want to hold a meaningful place in people's hearts – but getting any more specific than that tends to throw me into some of the analysis paralysis referenced earlier. Kurt Vonnegut, a favorite author, writes about teaching creative writing and says that it's critical that everyone in your story wants something, even if it is only a glass of water. I cite this example because it's so simple, direct, immediate, and yet so elusive for me most of the time.

Nevertheless while wandering the streets of Dublin in the middle of the night, I found myself wanting to play a guitar. The company I worked for has offices in many cities, and a few of them are known to have little music rooms or nooks. Even though I wasn't working in Dublin, I went ahead and let myself into the office to see if I could track down a guitar to play.

Travel has always been inspiring, has always moved me to feel different things, to try to look at people around me who've lived totally different lives than I have and try to really imagine what that's like, what the world looks like through their eyes. That awareness of the perspective shift I think is what makes it more natural for me to write while I'm on the road.

I found a guitar, and in the space of an hour or less, I took two fragments that I'd been unable to close the circle on and wrote them into two relatively finished songs. I mentioned the young woman earlier because in some way her presence was with me that night, I think in part because I know she hasn't traveled much and I found myself regularly wondering what she would think of what I was seeing, but also because the element that seemed to have been missing to finish at least this song, was my character wanting something.

The song is about many things. The title, "Other People's Coasts" is both a direct reference to major paradigm shifts I've come to each time I've visited West Africa (in particular, moments sitting on the Atlantic coast… see also "Trash Strewn Beach" from the Winters… record) and a nod to how I'd grown to feel about Seattle, where I'd been living for the past 7 years, but also most of the west coast – I'd spent a lot of time in the Bay Area for work, and though certainly at times I am and have been one of them, I can't shake the feeling that there's something very true in the way the current politics of the right describe "coastal elites." Which is as much as I'll say about politics here.

One of the themes that crops up throughout the record is about refugees, and the idea that more and more we are all refugees of a past, a place, a life that no longer exists as the world is changing faster and faster. I don't say that to try to hijack anyone else's narrative. My mother was a teacher of mostly refugee students when I was younger, so I grew up literally breaking bread with families from Somalia, Ethiopia, Cambodia, Laos, just to name a few (and the FOOD!)… those experiences not only made me want to travel, but helped me be curious about people's lives when traveling. People who've been forced to leave their homes, their countries, usually have gone through traumatic experiences – experiences that leave them changed in ways that can't be undone. Many of the stories I've heard have been infused with violence, oppression, loss of family and loved ones, constant fear, and typically some shred of hope or love or faith that gets them through, usually in part due to the grace of someone they were able to keep close to them.

We haven't all been through that, thankfully. Yet there is something about the rawness of experiences that leave us changed in ways that can't be undone – this simplest description can also describe coming of age, growing up, the loss of innocence and weary acceptance that tends to be associated with becoming an adult.

I spend so much of my life caught up in the momentum of various projects I've been involved in that when chance or circumstance or my own stupid choices forces me out of that momentum and gives me a chance to stand still for a minute, I find myself pretty unrooted. I don't mean to complain – I have amazing friends, I've had a very interesting life, and even when it feels like it's not going the greatest, I have a lot of skills and opportunities and I'll even say privilege to fall back on and make something new happen (crosses fingers). Still sometimes I wonder if I had let myself want things a little bit more and let the magnetism of that want draw people and places closer, perhaps I might have something that felt a little bit more like a home. Maybe still not like the home I came from which is gone forever, but maybe somewhere I could feel like I belonged.

Which feels like an awful lot to want for someone with so little experience and then to try to bake into one little song. So I did make it simpler, and I'm trying to start from where I am. The beginning of the third movement of the song had started out "and if it isn't clear, I've made up my mind, I breathe I hurt, I stay and I fight." Which is a lovely sentiment, but not quite right for someone who's packing up his shit and leaving town. Hence I added something about if the battle can be won…

Which brings us back in some ways to what I wrote about for track 1. The core of this album is about choosing. I can't win every battle, and by trying to, I often find I lose many battles that could have been won had I been focusing my attention. Moving out of Seattle turned into a total shitshow because I didn't give much thought to how to focus my energy on things I could actually prioritize and accomplish. There are deeper lessons here too… I've lost a few friends and friends of friends in recent months and years that I mean to give a nod to as I describe learning old songs and remembering those we've lost to battles that were unwinnable (there's a bonus track on the Winters record that is a cover I did of my old friend Paul Suel's song "A Better Way." Paul left us in 2019).

But this song is not about the refugees I've known… it _is_ about how we've broken bread in each other's homes. And though there's a little woe is me somewhere in this writing, I'm trying to live better, not just make myself merit badges for how I've suffered. I said that finishing the songs was about wanting something, and the simplest thing I could find that I wanted that night that seemed to resonate with the rest of the song required first that I remind myself "it is not my thoughts that make me real, it's what I choose to do and feel, so this is not just gas for spinning wheels, but miles to drive and kisses to steal." Not travel just for the sake of it, and not happily ever after, or a relationship, or even sex, just miles to drive and kisses to steal. I hope you're well, T.