I’ve been listening to a lot of Patti Page these days.
She’s one of the many underrated crooners who existed at the same time as Frank Sinatra and did not get the flowers she deserved. Patti sings a song about Cape Cod, where I’m from, called Old Cape Cod. When she released the song in 1957, she had never been to the Cape. Her song was an unexpected hit, that eclipsed the records’ A-side on Wondering. If you aren’t familiar with the song, take a minute and play it. If you feel like it, close your eyes and count how many voices are singing to you. It’s hypnotic. Notice the way the harmonies ebb and flow before expanding into thin air, like a sigh. To me, that sounds like waves on the beach, on a perfect summer day. I imagine a vintage convertible driving in slow motion by the shore. It isn’t always like that here, but sometimes, it really is.
Coast Fest was this weekend, and that’s real Cape Cod to me.
Coast Fest, 2025
Coast Fest is a music festival, headlined by local band, Crooked Coast. The festival features a day of music outside, food and beverage trucks and sitting in a beach chair and on blankets spread out over dead grass, with friends. The bandshell on Falmouth Harbor hosts bands from late afternoon until 10 PM, on the dot. The live music, lighting and stage production is professional. So professional, I forget I’m home. But then the smell of the harbor comes in with the cool breeze off the water. The faces in the crowd next to me are ones I know. Friends from work, town committee members, schools principals, old high school friends, treasured regulars from the bar, acquaintances I’ve seen around town. I know these people. We know all the words John, Luke and sometime Ben, are singing to us, and we sing their words back. Our heads collectively bang and jaws drop during Shaq’s drum interlude.
Crooked Coast wrote a song about Cape Cod, too. It’s not like Patti’s, because they know what the rest of the year looks like here. When I listen to Crooked Coast’s Cape Cod I can smell the cold air of the deep winter in the lyrics. I feel the abrupt halt of kinetic energy as a rush ends at work. The pause between bridge and chorus feels like a deep breath before jumping into the water. When I hear Crookeds’ Cape Cod, I can remember the taste of the long-awaited cigarette and cool refreshment of a beer after a double in July. I can imagine driving down the empty streets in my sisters’ beat up Honda Accord, and feel the relief in knowing what’s coming around the next bend. Crooked’s Cape Cod sounds like they’ve sped down Surf Drive all the way to the Heights. At dangerous speeds and they tested limits like we all did when we felt restless in the early dark of fall. Windows down, music up, we sang in the car into milkshake straws from McDonald’s. We knew then that those days would be fleeting. And they were.
Crooked Coasts’ music reminds me of being 17 with my best friends at South Cape Beach, laying on a blanket on the beach at 3 AM, laughing our assess off at absolutely nothing, completely sober, learning the three dots of Orion’s belt. In my tiny hometown, all we had is each other when the sidewalks rolled up at 8 PM. That clear, pure, memory swallows me when I listen to Crooked, especially live. It’s like the feeling of the wide shore, holding me as tight as it can. It says: Don’t forget.
Being at Coast Fest, singing along with the band about a place we love and call home, while the rest of the world calls it a destination, is cathartic. It makes me remember why I love it here, why I want to stay here, why I want to protect this place and the people in it. Coast Fest is a strand of thread that keeps us connected. It’s an event for locals, on a Saturday night, in the summer. It can’t be understated how locals avoid our favorite places for three months because they’re overrun, and how important it is to connect when we can.
We need these times, like Coast Fest, to be together.
Cape Cod by Crooked Coast, Coast Fest, 2025
Well done!