The Sugar Oaks

Plenty of people like Bruce Springsteen align their music with where they grew up; they write songs about their hometown, they reflect the people and their values and their ethics. But the music of the Sugar Oaks goes beyond simple romanticism of pleasant geographic features or the region's blue collar workers. Like their namesake, their music is deeply rooted in Florida soil, the same soil tread by Ray Charles, William Bartram, Zora Neale Hurston and the Highwaymen.

As of late we've been looking for new sprouts from that soil. Not some imported farm-grown palm tree like the ones they plant in perfect rows on the sides of the toll roads. Not Mississippi Jimmy Buffet and his margaritas, not Frankenstein Lou Pearlman and his Universal Studios patchworks. More like the one I found five years ago in Eric Hayden's bedroom, after he moved back to Clearwater from a failed attempt to leave. And believe me, there are plenty of reasons to leave. Living in a converted Florida room in the back of his mom's house he'd play me a new song he wrote, one or two new ones every week. And I had a revelation. Soon I had my own cassette tape, dubbed from the TV after I brought my parents' camcorder to an early Sugar Oaks show. That tape became the soundtrack to every car ride home with the windows down and our bathing suits soaking the seats, getting sand on the floormats. The soundtrack to every new realization on the path to discovering what it is I loved about my home. I'd play it at work that summer during the violent, late afternoon thunderstorms; the Sugar Oaks being the steam that rises from the pavement when it's all over.

Where we're from, the line between paradise and wasteland is hard to draw. In every sparkling, dolphin-spewing vista there's a smokestack from an abandoned chemical plant or a crumbling railroad bridge. For every golden eagle's nest, there's a radio tower or a splintering telephone pole underneath. For every idyllic Grapefruit League spring training day at the park, there's the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and a Tropicana Field full of Yankees fans.

You don't have to be a Floridian to get it. America was once the United States, sovereign entities each with something unique to offer. We are moving more and more towards one America, where every town looks and feels the same. But you can still find something in that soil. That soil some see as an undevelopable swamp waiting to be drained and built upon. But if you look closer you'll see it's a river of grass, an elaborate, self-sustaining ecosystem found nowhere else on the earth. That's where you'll find the Sugar Oaks.

-- Brett Walsh

Hometown: Orlando, FL
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