A girl, lost between the empty hallways. Words and melodies sitting idle within, untouched and unseen. The dusted spaces between yellow couches and splintering tanbark. cavernous apologies echoing across her mind.
It started with the sea.
Something like solace was found at the sea. For hours she’d sit before its majesty, watching as the tides rushed to rob the shoreline of its senses, only to fall backwards into placid calm.
It all made sense then: the ocean was my mirror.
In the summer of 2025, I decided to fulfill my lifelong dream of creating a mermaid folk rock album. Tidefall is an ode to this beauty, that vastness, the devastation of feeling. an outpouring of limerance and grief and jubilation and everything I’ve felt the last 25 years.
Aesthetically, I wanted Tidefall to become an immersive surrealist landscape— a hybrid of my upbringing near the Big Sur coast and my own dreamlands. A girl in a white dress draped over the rocks and sea. Oil paintings and swirling colors of the ocean at sunset. I wanted to pay homage to my childhood adoration of y2k mermaids, female singer-songwriters, and the Californian coast.
I moodboarded, then storyboarded, then created the shot list for the “Pacifist” music video, which my father and I filmed in Carmel/Monterey across a weekend. It was far from a fancy set up, but it didn’t matter.
Creating the music was one of the most incredible and enlightening experiences of my life. I came in with 10 of my favorite songs from the past decade and worked with truly the most talented friends to craft the sound: acoustic Californian surf rock, indie folk writing, girly pop melodies. I recorded everything within home studios, did many remote sessions, sent millions of notes to make sure everything was as perfect as I could. Beyond the recognition I’ve gotten for the project so far, I’m even more ecstatic that my collaborators are receiving the flowers they deserve. They are truly some of the most talented, kind, and wonderful people I’ve ever met in my life.
Coming-of-age is a cycle of tides. Reliving the same waves breaking, over and over again. Predictable, yes, but never quite so simple. Each pattern embeds a new fingerprint into the sand, each stone and shell and seaweed washes up slightly anew.
Tidefall is the dreamscape I’ve called home for the past year. It’s shaped, reinvented, and healed me in unspeakable, magical ways. It’s become my safe space to embrace the wonder of big, powerful feelings and the tides of life.
My sincerest hope is that it will be yours, too.
[can we insert your handwritten signature here in white?]