Hey everybody, how’s it going?
It’s been a few days since I saw Sinners, and again, wow—what an incredible film! Without a doubt, it’s one of the most powerful pieces of cinema I’ve seen in the last four or five years. I’ll likely go see it again soon. For the third time!
As often happens after watching a film that weaves music so deeply into its narrative, I found myself pulled back into my own archives—revisiting some of the songs I wrote years ago, long before poetry and film became my dominant forms of expression.
It’s been about seven years since I last wrote a new song. I might’ve jotted down a line or two, maybe a chorus here and there, but most of the material I’ve written, recorded, or captured in some form—whether in a journal, a voice memo, or on my old digital recorder—is well over a decade old now.
I still have one of my original songbooks from when I was 18 or 19, carefully transferring songs from a beat-up composition notebook into that brown, leather-bound journal. At last count, I probably have over 100, maybe closer to 300 songs or fragments of songs—some fully written, others just a hook, a verse, a feeling.
One that’s always stuck with me, though, is “Coast of Love.”
It started with a dream…
Back then, I was writing almost daily—sometimes finishing a song in under an hour and memorizing it by the end of the day. By the time I wrote Coast of Love, my pace had slowed, but the spirit was still there. The song took about two weeks to write, another three to rehearse, and I recorded the rough cut in just under five hours. No studio. No vocal tuning. Just an iPad app for the backing track and a trusty old 8-track digital recorder I still don’t fully know how to use. Every vocal line was recorded by hand—one take at a time, best take wins.
But the real story behind the song is the dream.
In the dream, I was years into the future, on tour, performing in front of a massive crowd by the sea—a literal “coast of love.” The music was flowing, the energy electric, and as I sang, my eyes landed on a single figure in the crowd. A woman. An angelic presence, half-smiling in awe and admiration. And in that moment, it was as if the entire performance, the entire night, was for her.
But also for me.
The dream wasn’t just about success—it was about permission. Permission to enjoy the fruits of hard work. To recognize the beauty of the moment. But also, to have the courage to let it pass… to release it, so something new could bloom.
That idea—the balance of holding joy and letting go—shaped the entire writing process. It took weeks of reflection, conversation, and soul-searching to translate that experience into a song. But what came out was something I still hold dear.
So today, in celebration of music’s power to connect, transcend, and ground us—I’m sharing the original rough cut of Coast of Love. I’ve never recorded it in a professional studio. Maybe one day I will. Maybe I won’t. But I plan to start sharing more of these drafts here—unpolished, unreleased, but deeply meaningful.
This is the first of many.
I hope you enjoy “Coast of Love – The Rough Cut.”
Let me know what you hear in it.
– E. A. Bland
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