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From The Desk Of Bird Of Youth’s Clinton Newman: Naples, Florida

Bird Of Youth has no business being this good. Really. If writing and recording a really beautiful album was as easy as Beth Wawerna and her crew made it look, wouldn’t everyone do it? That’s sort of the story here. For most of her decade in New York, Wawerna was, in the words of her pal Timothy Bracy, “the consummate green-room insider.” Her background in journalism and her unerring taste had led to a number of indie-rock acquaintances who eventually became friends. It sounds like a pretty good time, hanging out in Brooklyn with the Mendoza Line’s Bracy and Pete Hoffman, Will Sheff of Okkervil River, Carl Newman, Charles Bissell of the Wrens, Nada Surf’s Matthew Caws and others. But it turned out Wawerna had a secret stash of her own songs, which she’d worked on and demo’d and never, ever let anyone hear. Eventually, she decided it was time to set those songs free. Her pals not only liked them, they helped her form a crack band—guitarist par excellence Clint Newman, drummer Ray Ketchem, bassist Johnny North, keyboardist Eli Thomas and accordion player Elizabeth Bracy Nelson—and recorded them. Sheff and Phil Palazzolo (New Pornographers, Ted Leo) produced. Bissell contributed a terrific guitar lead on one song. Caws sang. Members of Okkervil River and the National played. The finished album, Defender, was released in May, just in time to give your summer a worthy soundtrack. Wawerna and Clint Newman will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week, and once a day, Wawerna is having one of her famous friends guest blog. Read our brand new Q&A with her.

Newman: My wife and I recently spent a few days in Naples, Fla., with my parents, who, as willful senior citizens, were taking a lengthier vacation from this awful, awful spring than we, the young—cough—anhedonic couple, could convince ourselves to take. But no worries; we had an awesome time. My dad, an only child, started going to Naples every year with his parents around 60 years ago and remembers when the town installed its first stop light (corner of Fifth Avenue & Third Street). Mom and dad began taking me (only child, natch) to Naples for the family vacation at around age three, and so the tradition continued, through the passing of my grandparents, up until I was around 16 and no longer much enjoyed spending the entirety of my two-week Christmas break alone with my parents in a town that had by then turned into a slightly more-Protestant Boca Raton (Oldsmobile, blue rinse).

So after a 20-year absence, the Newmans returned to Naples, and oh how things change/stay the same! Gone was the old cafeteria-style restaurant where as a child I would choose a “hamburger steak” with gravy and three plates of green jello (plaque on the wall: “Don’t criticize the coffee. You may be old and weak yourself someday!”). Still there was childhood wonderland Tin City, the distressed faux-wharf complex built in the late-’70s to house 30 identical gift shops selling scrimshaw and authentic Tom Selleck Magnum P.I. Hawaiian shirts. New was the entire block of “Historic Olde Naples” that had been bought up and turned into three stores and one shitty restaurant by the “Tommy Bahama” corporation. (I’m more of a “Margaritaville” man myself.)

Most exciting to me was the continued existence of the Olde Naples Surf Shop, sight of untold hours of adolescent me wandering around coveting surfer gear, imagining how rad my life would finally be if only I could turn myself into a manly, tan surfer dude by purchasing multiple pairs of day-glo Jams brand shorts. Then as now, I chose to conveniently ignore the ridiculousness of a surf shop in a retirement town on the Gulf of Mexico, where there are no wave and horrible surfing. Also, I was scared to go swimming in the ocean and was easily sunburned. Looking back, the massive amount of anxiety that the Olde Naples Surf Shop caused in me makes the happiness I felt in finding it still in business seem sort of … twisted. Ah, capitalism!

But let me back up. Naples was founded in the 1880s by the owner of the Louisville Courier-Journal, Walter Haldeman. So word of this exotic-yet-tameable paradise spread more quickly through Kentucky than a lot of other states. Thus it was not really so strange that, beginning sometime around 1952, my grandfather and his tobacco farmer/fishing brethren from Woodford County, Ky., would strike out for Naples for a week or two of excellent fishing and proud, unencumbered drinking. But as families and responsibilities grew around its pioneering visitors, so did Naples grow (aww). Actually, it was always regarded as the glamorous spot on the southwest coast, but it certainly never seemed the least big glamorous to me growing up. Plenty rich people had the big beachfront houses with cool, dark, screened-in porches and excellent beach/private-toilet proximity, but other than that it all just seemed like a bunch of very well-cared-for mom-and-pop stores and restaurants in a small town populated by very hospitable people who didn’t really seem much different from the ones back home.

Now, it’s a different story. In the last 20 years, Naples has turned into a conspicuous-consumption-scape that reminds me of nothing so much as this one particular super-high-end outdoor shopping mall where I ended up once last year in San Jose, Calif., but we’ll save that for my LiveJournal. So thank goodness my dad managed to find the one remaining ’50s-era motel, just like the one we’d stayed in for 40 years: one level, eight rooms, numbered parking spaces. Henry, the owner, inherited it from his mother, lives in the office apartment and washes every towel and linen himself. Henry told me that two guys in town rent a two-unit garage just a few blocks from the motel and open it up to the public every Monday night, free of charge. One side is for local artists to exhibit their work and socialize. The other side is a public “jam” room with a drum set, keyboard, some amps and a couple mics; musicians are welcome to bring whatever they want and play. Henry said a lot of the music was “plunking around, jazz stuff,” but I’m willing to bet that Stevie Ray Vaughn is involved. If not, he will be when I get there, next year.

More photos after the jump.