Overview

From Dick Dale’s reverb-drenched guitar leads to the Beach Boys’ wistful odes to California, surf music is historically viewed as a novelty of the early 1960s, sandwiched between the Elvis craze and Beatlemania. Worse, today’s mainstream listeners hear surf music as the sort of sonically straightforward, pleasantly inoffensive music that the Spotify algorithm supplies to any playlist with the words chill or vibes in their names.

Yet if you look more closely at the history of twentieth-century pop culture, you discover surfing at the center of nearly every sonic paradigm shift and boundary expansion in popular music.Hawaiian music, the first to soundtrack the surf dance, introduced the guitar as a lead instrument. Surfers were hip to the unimpeachably cool West Coast jazz scene, and helped define California’s distinctive beach culture in the first decades after World War II. Surfers helped create the visual language of the psychedelic era. Surfing found its way into the punk scene in the Bowery, rode the New Wave, and started the slam pit. Surfers helped build the DIY culture that begot indie rock, brought a melodic form of punk to the masses, and fronted the biggest and most enduring band of the grunge era.

In The Sea in Every Sound, surfer and music journalist Matthew Shaw journeys to the coastal edges of the continental United States—the places where surfing and music collide—in search of the full story of how surfers and surfing influenced popular music and continue to push sonic boundaries. Along the way, he reveals that the spirit at the heart of wave-riding—independent and innovative, noncommercial and nomadic—has turned popular music on its ear over and over again.

Reviews

“Like an Alan Lomax for the surfing set, Matthew Shaw went broad and deep for this exhaustive, lively, and surprising study of wave riding’s influence on music. No pat recount of dripping reverb, writer/surfer/musician Shaw lays down the roots of surf sound from Sol Hoopii to Bud Shank to the Pixies. Surfing has long deserved this rigor, this open-mindedness. Shaw delivered.” —Scott Hulet, creative director of the Surfer’s Journal and author of Flow Violento 

“The best music writing doubles as cultural history. Shaw documents how a spiritual and countercultural religion took root and spawned sounds immediately identifiable and forever associated with the beach, the sun, and sliding on waves. What is it about surf culture that has always captivated artists and the public? This is a great book for anyone who wants to see how an idea spreads.” —Jay Caspian Kang, columnist at the New Yorker and author of The Loneliest Americans 

“The Sea in Every Sound is an immersive plunge into the vast and lively world of surf culture. Matthew Shaw’s heartfelt narrative history interrogates the inextricable link between music and surfing, illuminating the almost cosmic interconnectedness between them. A vivid blend of reporting and storytelling.” —Brady Brickner-Wood, contributing writer at the New Yorker 

“Matthew Shaw writes the definitive history of music’s relationship to surfing, and vice versa, making it an essential read for students of either, or both. Better, though, is the writing itself: informative, sharp, and very witty. Even people who hate surfing or music will love it. It makes me jealous. Five out of five stars.” —Chas Smith, founder of BeachGrit and author of Welcome to Paradise, Now Go to Hell

Author Biography

Matthew Shaw has traveled the world as musician and as a features writer for the Surfer’s Journal and Surfer magazine. As a music journalist, he’s contributed to NPR Music and NPR’s All Songs Considered, and produced radio programming for WJCT Public Media, an NPR affiliate in Jacksonville, Florida. He’s currently the arts and culture editor for Jacksonville Today, a nonprofit news organization. He lives in Atlantic Beach, Florida.