This song took 12 years to write. I remember being 19 years old, sitting on my bed around 4:30 in the morning, playing my Gibson Les Paul Deluxe and taking in the new dawn spilling through my window. Inspired to capture the wonder of it all with what I felt could be a mystical combination of chords, I played every chord I knew, drew funny pictures of what I was trying to musically represent, and even scribbled a few poems all in the effort to capture the moment. Then those two very unique chords, A with an augmented 11th, and an A13 sus4, fell from the sky and onto my fretboard. I instantly knew I’d just played a combination of chords no one else had thought to put together before. I strummed those two chords over and over until my fingers gave out.

Many years later, as I was writing for this record, I finally figured out what the rest of the song should sound like. It was impossible to come up with a title that explained what those two opening chords meant to me, or what they put me through! So, I searched for a new title and came up with what was to be the title of the album as well. That was until a British journalist told me how much he disliked it as an album title during a pre-release interview. Hours later, after thinking about his critique, I thought to myself, “How about, Surfing With The Alien?”