About “Sea Songs For Little Pirates”

The ocean inspires pretty much everything in my life. From surfing my whole life on the Outer Banks (home to Blackbeard) to choosing to come to UNCW for my marine biology degree. I was a marine educator on and off for a long time after college, working for the NC Aquarium, UNCW Marine Quest, and WB Surf Camp. Not having kids myself, I have a lot of good friends with kids who all call me Uncle Jason, and I’m super fortunate to have had my nieces and nephew living close by for the last few years. They all love to go fishing and exploring in the salt marsh and they love learning. So everything we do is a learning lesson and we have a lot of fun discovering everything our beautiful coastal life has to offer. I have funny trucker hat that a friend gave me which has “Captain” prominently displayed on it so from the very first time I took my nieces down to get in the boat we had to establish etiquette and ground rules, such as; always do what the captain says, and “always wear your life jackets!” And then my wife and I were at a little gift shop down in Southport and I found these super cute Pirate and Shark puppets which I’ll bring out during story time with the nieces or when visiting with my friends and their kids…and quite a bit through the recording process…

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So when I sat down to start writing the songs, I began reflecting quite a bit on some of the lessons I used to teach and experiences I’ve had with the kids and tried to weave in some educational aspects as well as some nautical folk-lore.

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The “Captain” was the first character that came to life. As I started writing and recording demos of these songs, and singing out loud, some sort of pirate spirit animal came out. I found myself growling and taking on the “Captain” persona. He sings a song from the perspective of a sad blue crab stuck in a crab pot in the “Carb Pot Blues”. The Tidal Swing was inspired by an old family friend who has long since passed. Leon Swain was his name. When I was about 8 years old, he would come by from time to time and in his Hatteras brogue accent would yell “There’s a hoigh toide on the soundsoide tonight!” It was the funniest thing. My grandmother especially loved it and used to bring it up at every holiday meal and do her best impression of him. The Stingray Shuffle was fun, because I had my old friend and fellow surfer, the legendary DC punk rock producer Don Zientara sing the part of “Don The Stingray”. Don has always been an inspiration and mentor as I’ve taught myself through the years the art of recording, not to mention producing some of my favorite bands, such as Minor Threat, Bad Brains, and Fugazi, as an angsty youth.

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Punk rock has been and always will be an anti-establishment, anti-status quo, pro-change, pro-justice, protest form of music. It was definitely one of my first loves as a young adolescent surfer/skater. I’d been raised on the Beatles and Stray Cats as a kid, so I appreciated good music, but hearing Social Distortion and Bad Religion for the first time set off some deep resonating alarm in me. So it only felt right to include a punk rock song as a lover of the ocean, watching society treat it like toilet. Working closely with my friend Bonnie Monteleone and Plastic Ocean Project here in Wilmington over the last decade, the single use plastics issue is one that still hasn’t slowed down and one that is just now beginning to get traction with possible solutions as we are slowly getting it into the consciousness of the masses, and heads of state, and more importantly the youth. They will inherit this mess we leave them with, but kids are smart and powerful, and can have a lot of influence in their communities and families like my friends at Eco Marines over in Brisbane, Australia. They empower their ambassadors to take the conservation education lessons back to their classmates, their schools, their families, and ultimately their communities and countries. We can at least shut off the faucet of production now and find alternatives, or go back to traditional methods of handling things. Then, maybe the clean up of our mistakes won’t be as dauntingly impossible as it seems. Plastics are literally killing the ocean all the way up the trophic chain right to our dinner plates, and no one seems to be aware it’s happening…I could keep going, but go visit Plastic Ocean Project to learn more about how to help.

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The ocean is just so vast and so fascinating to me. Most people never see past the surface standing on the shore. So I wrote The Deep Blue as a kind of “get out and explore!” anthem. Go far, go deep, and see for yourself how amazing this little planet we live on really is. I had an awesome BIG book when I was a kid. The pages all folded out and it showed an average sized human next to all of these massive extinct and living animals. The blue whale, the giant squid, and learning about the sperm whale wrestling these squid down in the deepest depths was just so cool to picture and think about as a kid. With all the songs I wanted the parents to be able to listen to songs like this and still enjoy them, but I didn’t want to get too Disney or insult kids’ intelligence. So I just tried to blend some fun facts with some folk-lore so that maybe in a few years the kids listen back think, “oh yeah, I’ve heard about lantern fish coming to the surface. It was in that song…” or they ask their parents about something they heard in the song and it sends them down a exploratory path.

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The Ballad of Mary Lee is dedicated to my friend Ryan McInnis, as well as his lovely wife Meredith, and their little guy, Atlas. Mary Lee, for us oceanographer nerds, was one of the first and largest great white sharks tagged with a GPS tracker off the east coast by a group called Ocearch. She was named after the founder’s mum. Ryan’s Marine Biology degree senior thesis at UNCW, five years prior to me, discussed the existence of great whites in the western Atlantic and I think he got D because his professors scoffed and argued they didn’t exist off our coast. So here’s this massive great white (amongst many others) being tracked up and down the east coast, and at one point she even swam up into the Cape Fear (and from what I could tell out Snow’s Cut) and right past Wrightsville Beach while I was surfing one cold winter day. You could see a massive flock of birds about a mile offshore diving and obviously all following a school of fish. So the song is kind of a nerdy conservation ballad (if that’s a thing), and an ode to one of the most beautiful creatures on earth. The song speaks to the importance of sharks, the need for them, the senseless fear of them, and the fascinating beautiful creatures that they are. I was very fortunate and thankful to have my good friend Crystal Bright, a Chapel Hill based musician, visit the home studio and contribute her vocals and accordion to help realize the song.