Hello, reader of these words. This website is a place to share my work directly and catalog my songs, life, and projects. Entries focus on songs along with travel notes, dreams, stories, and reflections on the creative process. The latest are below. Visit Posts to browse entries by category.
– Latest Posts –
- Porchanga! 2026On the last day of May, the second annual Porchanga took place on a porch in Port Orford. The event was named by host and performer Heather Carpenter – a play on pachanga, the latin American term for a lively party with dancing, music, and jubilation. With minimal surprise, the day turned out to be extremely windy. The curtain we’d planned to draw between sets proved impossible. The balloon decorations and tapestries had to be nailed to the porch and nailed again as the party went on. Setup was tedious and time-consuming, complicated by what we eventually diagnosed as dirty… Read more: Porchanga! 2026
- Finger WizardsOver the last few months I’ve been playing in a new band yet to be officially named but currently being referred to as The Port Orford Shreds. The band consists of Ben Horton on drums, my brother Ryan Feliciano on guitar and myself on bass. We’ve been talking about doing this project for several years, a project built around Ryan’s shred guitar playing – covering instrumentals from some of our favorite virtuosic shred guitarists. For me this project represents a return to a style of music and approach that I had essentially moved away from for about 15 years. In… Read more: Finger Wizards
- Website – Visions RevisitedHello reader of these words. Over the last week I’ve been making some design and page updates to the website and revisiting a number of older entries where I have made some changes. This will be all about the website with reflections on where it began and how it’s developed so far, along with some goals moving forward. In the spring of 2025 I was traveling the US, and I began to really try to come up with an alternative means of sharing my music and my creative projects outside of the big social media and streaming platforms. At that… Read more: Website – Visions Revisited
- Updates: Redwoods, Studio, Cornfield BluesIt’s been a couple months since I’ve published any new entries on the site. I’ve got a few big entries in the works that I’ve yet to sit down and finish. For now, some updates from the last few months. Over the last months I’ve been spending a lot of time with family and dividing my weeks between my home on the Oregon coast and the new home of my dad and grandmother at the foot of the redwoods just outside of Crescent City, California. I was still a teenager the very first time I traveled up to see the… Read more: Updates: Redwoods, Studio, Cornfield Blues
- The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 3 – Songs 14-26Continuing from Pt. 1 (& the unfinished Pt. 2) – this entry contains all the songs and stories behind the songs I wrote and recorded during the second half of the 30 day song a day challenge in July 2017. No Body No Body, like many songs, came from a dream. There was one specific dream during that month of July where I was less interested in the events of the dream and more in the position from which I experienced it. Generally speaking I dream with a body that feels much like my familiar human body in waking life… Read more: The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 3 – Songs 14-26
- The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 2 – Songs 1-13Continuing from Pt. 1 – this entry contains the songs and stories behind the songs I wrote and recorded during the first half of the 30 day song-a-day challenge in July 2017. Ten To One This is a historic song for me — the very first song of the very first song challenge I ever attempted. One thing I discovered over the course of that first month was that in order to keep up with the demands of the task at hand, I would need to take the following approach: every day start something, and every day finish something. With… Read more: The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 2 – Songs 1-13
- The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 1 – BackgroundIn July 2017 I was living full-time at Rad Pro Studios on 123 W. D St. in Ontario, California. I had built out one of the smallest rooms in the building into my recording space – a place to practice, write and record. I slept in a long hallway in the basement, which was an echo chamber made entirely of concrete. I would drop a mattress on the floor when it was time to sleep. At one end of the corridor we had rigged up a makeshift shower – a garden hose with a drain. Rad Pro took reservations 24… Read more: The Challenge: July 2017 Pt. 1 – Background
- Dust / Been Missin’In October 2023 we began the first round of Tim Bulster’s song-a-week songwriting group. This came at a perfect time – I had resolved to dedicate the fall and winter to writing and recording, stepping away from other obligations to hold space for that. I was also on the mend from a rough break-up that happened a few months before and coming out of a depressive spell that followed (and preceded). Writing became the main engine for processing everything I was feeling. There was one evening where I was trying to play guitar and felt so disconnected from the instrument… Read more: Dust / Been Missin’
- The Challenge(s) – OverviewSomething that comes up across many entries on this site are songwriting groups and challenges. What this means is essentially an organized period of group or individual songwriting with set deadlines and accountability. Participating in these groups and challenges has been essential to my creative development over the last decade. Writing requires that I maintain a level of close connection with myself. More specifically, writing songs has become a process of connecting with my emotions – allowing myself to feel deeply and reflect, while opening up to whatever creative ideas come through that connection. Often I am too occupied, stressed,… Read more: The Challenge(s) – Overview
- Ring Any BellsIn our song-a-week group there are no rules about what we can submit each week other than it cannot be a previously completed song. Otherwise anything goes – an instrumental, a set of lyrics, a one minute acapella sketch or a fully fleshed out five minute production. The point is simply to write and submit something new. But in week four of the fall 2024 group, Tim brought a surprise. That Monday he sent this: “Here’s something I’ve always wanted to try — this week, we’re all going to write a song with the same title. I opened one of… Read more: Ring Any Bells
- Can’t AbideWork Work Work Work Work I started working at 13. A few days a week after school I bused tables, delivered drinks and food, took drink orders, cleaned and vacuumed at the end of the night, and handled cash at my uncle’s restaurant inside the El Monte Airport in the San Gabriel Valley – now renamed the San Gabriel Valley Airport. The minimum wage at the time was $6.75 an hour. For a 13 year old that felt like real money – enough to buy almost anything I wanted, which at that age was mostly CDs and music gear. What… Read more: Can’t Abide
- Timeless ExpanseI often remember a series of dreams after waking. After a long night of dreaming especially, but also during shorter bursts. The dreams I was having during the days around Stephen’s services were getting extremely vivid – emotionally and spiritually charged in a way I don’t often experience. I believe those qualities are always present while dreaming on some level, but everything intensified during that time. I’ve been thinking about what may have led to this specifically. Grief is too broad a word for it. I think the fundamental thing that happened in that time was that I gave myself… Read more: Timeless Expanse
- Musical SnapshotsRecently I’ve been developing a concept I’m calling the musical snapshot. The idea is this: whatever I play or compose or improvise in a given moment is an expression of what I’m feeling at that time – some instinct, some inspiration, some emotion I may not even be fully aware of. I couldn’t have played or composed that particular idea at any other time, in a different place or state of mind. So any piece of music I write is essentially a snapshot of my creative and emotional state at the moment it was made. Of course there are other… Read more: Musical Snapshots
- Our Golden Days Have PassedThis is the last song I wrote for the winter/spring round of the 2026 songwriting group. It was written during an extremely emotional time. I was mourning the sudden death of a dear friend – Stephen Reed – and I had returned to the LA area, the place where I spent the first 20 years of my life and a few more on and off after that. I took two trips down and spent nearly a month there consecutively – more time than I’d spent down there in seven or eight years, including flying home for a weekend in between.… Read more: Our Golden Days Have Passed
- BodyThis 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… Read more: Body
- My OpinionsMy 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.… Read more: My Opinions
- World Is AbstruseThis 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… Read more: World Is Abstruse
- Werns
I wrote the first verse of this song in January 2024. Just as the song suggests, I was chilling at the beach watching my dogs dig. I can picture it vividly – sitting on Battle Rock Beach on a beautiful January afternoon, the dogs were digging and just making me laugh. I was filled with joy as I am in the simple moments with them. I think I wrote down the first few lines just as they are, and within a few days I started singing and playing this funky guitar melody to those words. The original demo was me… Read more: Werns - 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… Read more: Fallen Giant - Maytag LandThe song was mostly composed, arranged, and recorded within my van amidst travels down to Los Angeles in February 2026. The song began from a Reddit prompt: “Write a song about the happy land where socks are escaping to. But try to write it in a minor key, and add some twist.” It’s rare that I write from a prompt but I always appreciate prompt writing for pushing me to write something that otherwise most likely never would have been considered. It provides a kind of safe distance from what I’m writing – I don’t have to feel too attached.… Read more: Maytag Land
- March [2024]March is a collection of songs and videos self-produced between February and April 2024, beginning at home in Oregon and continuing as I traveled between Oregon, Hawaii, mainland Australia, and Tasmania. These tracks cover a span of six years and a distance of 8,000 miles. Some took months of creative teeth-pulling to put together. Others were written and recorded in a few hours — one in the moment of creation. Recorded across states and continents, across different moods and seasons and lifetimes. Edited, mixed and arranged on buses, planes, in forests, cliff sides, spare bedrooms, a van, a dome, and… Read more: March [2024]
- Only The Lucky Grow Old
This song was written during the first week of the fall 2025 songwriting group. I was already making progress on another song when this one came to me very quickly one night. I remember having a long day and getting very sick from some sort of caffeinated beverage in the evening. I was running sound at our local venue and sitting at the bar after the show when I had a conversation with an older man – he was at least twice my age. He said jokingly at some point, “I hope I stay young forever.” In that moment I… Read more: Only The Lucky Grow Old - Sweetheart
Sweetheart began its life as a jumbled mess of riffs, melodies and nonsensical phrases stitched together with musical scotch tape. There were four or five sections to this piece but little intention behind the original lyrics. It didn’t go anywhere. Originally recorded in December 2024, it was almost a year later when I salvaged one guitar riff and a melody which became the jumping off point for Sweetheart. I went to a screening of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Howl’s Moving Castle in theaters in fall 2025. I had seen it a couple times before, but this time I was particularly captivated… Read more: Sweetheart - Redwood Nature Trail — Moving WaterRedwood Nature Trail — Field Recording In January 2025 I took a drive up the beautiful Chetco River on a mission to capture the sights and sounds of water flowing along the Redwood Nature Trail. A frequent stop when I find myself in Brookings, the Redwood Nature Trail is just eight miles up North Bank Road – half a mile past Alfred A Loeb state park. Here lives the northernmost redwood grove in the US with old growth redwoods reaching up to 250 feet tall and 10 feet in diameter. According to the USDA some of these trees are estimated… Read more: Redwood Nature Trail — Moving Water
- Miles AwayFor several years I worked with the county providing audiovisual services – mainly during their routine business meetings. Commissioner meetings, workshops, budget committees. Any instance where the elected officials were set to discuss and vote on county business, I would be there making sure everything was captured on video and audio and streamed live to the public. There were periods where this was the most consistent money gig I had going. The commute was nearly 30 miles each way between Port Orford and Gold Beach – coastal highway the whole way, passing multiple state parks, untouched beaches, cliffs dropping straight… Read more: Miles Away
- Sweet SleepThis piece originated in the winter of 2023. I got into writing a series of instrumental pieces based around horn parts – the collection of songs that I file under the name Dokie Okie. Eventually, I’d like to produce the songs properly with a full band and live horn arrangements, but for now they all exist as MIDI demos. I brought this one together and included it on the March collection after shooting video on an elusive snow day at my home in Port Orford. The snowfall only lasted about 20 minutes, but being a desert child, it was magical… Read more: Sweet Sleep
- Perfect TimeI arrived in Hobart in perfect time on March 20th. I was picked up at the airport by my new friend Dave, the kiwi I had met on Oahu. He took me to his home in Geilston Bay, the address of which is on my Tasmanian ID (valid till 2029). I arrived in the late evening so he got me set up in the guest space and showed me out to a space in the backyard where he kept his music gear. There he left me with the invite to play his drums, basses and acoustic guitar. I grabbed the… Read more: Perfect Time
- Oahu Noodles“Oahu Noodles” is a track made up of couple of improvisations I recorded on the porch of Backpackers Vacation Inn & Hostel on the north side of Oahu, Hawaii. The first week of March 2024, I was making my way to Australia for the first time and saw flights that transferred at Honolulu airport, so I decided to book a 4 night layover, rent a car and explore Oahu for a few days. Through couchsurfing I had lined up a sweet spot to stay on a small boat during my visit, but the day before I arrived the stay fell… Read more: Oahu Noodles
- 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… Read more: Scroll Hole/Alex
- Acaso
From the March album – originally written Fall 2023 “Acaso” came together during one of the most emotionally intensive periods of my songwriting life, built around a piece of music I’d been playing with for years. It was 2014 when I returned to the states after over a year of traveling abroad – this was a piece I’d begun playing on the road but finalized and decided to dedicate to the San Gabriel Valley suburb where I grew up. I called it “Temple City Theme.” Here’s a recording of the piece I did with my friend Stephen Reed (of the… Read more: Acaso - Gutter BabyIn all my travels, never have I met a gnarlier bunch of traveling folks than the “gutter punks.” I once got off a bus in New Orleans and immediately got heckled by one across the street yelling, “Hippie! Give me money!” Hitchhiking around the U.S. and Canada, I met quite a few – jamming, sleeping and hanging around on the streets, trying to catch lifts along the way. Inspired by people I met on the street around Montreal, Humboldt & Mendocino counties, this song is an amalgamation of stories I’ve heard from these folks, some of my own experiences traveling,… Read more: Gutter Baby
- Website – VisionsHello, reader of these words. I am rebuilding this website with a specific concept in mind – creating a place where I can share my work directly and catalog my work, life and recordings. I doubt the practicality and relevance of a “www.com” website here in 2025, but my sense of fatigue and conflict around platforms like ig/faboo/spotify have grown too discomforting to ignore. I want to share my work in a medium that doesn’t feel ethically questionable, even if I am limiting the potential ‘reach’ of the work. I will continue to use said platforms to share minimally, but… Read more: Website – Visions
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