matthew houck

Phosphorescent and a Beach by Where We Live

In front of La Luna hotel in Tulum

Matthew Houck creates some pretty fine music under the name Phosphorescent. If you haven't heard him before, this song from his upcoming album is a good place to start, although not necessarily an indication of the sounds you'll hear on his others. It's calmer in a way. Not that his other songs are in the soundtrack to Girls Gone Wild, this one just has a certain kind of calmness to it. Maybe it's the repetitive background sounds and echoed vocals. I don't really know so much about the thesaurus researched music writing you get elsewhere. I'm a simple man.

If you too can appreciate simplicity, you'll appreciate Song for Zula.

It sounds really cheesy, but I went down there with a guitar and got a little hut on the beach in Tulum, on the Yucatan Peninsula.

I don't know if Song for Zula was one of the ones written down here, but I can see this one going perfectly with late afternoons and evenings on the calm beaches of Tulum. If you haven't visited yourself, it's hard to get a grasp on how special of a place Tulum is right now.

The beach, the sea, the independent hotels and restaurants are all part of a small community with a perfect balance between rustic and refined. Restaurants have a relaxed, homemade feel, with a quality of food and drink you'd expect from accomplished chefs or bartenders in big cities. The beaches aren't busy like the towns to the north and the main street that runs parallel to the beach is barely lit, or not at all. Food is cooked in stone ovens and on charcoal grills. Alcohol is served all day long and the sun is almost always out. Even when it's not, the rain is still refreshing as everyone grabs their drinks and food to run under the nearest palapa, or out into the ocean where rain doesn't matter.

Whatever Houck got up to while down in Tulum was undoubtedly a good process for being productve, since it's stocked in abundance down there, and this song shows it.

Quote above was taken from Free People.