BEACH DAZE CELEBRATES FIVE FASCINATING YEARS OF BROKEN TOGETHER
Five years is a long time when you're in your twenties.
It's enough time to finish school, rewrite your goals a dozen times and slowly realize the songs you wrote as a teenager don't belong to the same person anymore. Anthony Gualano – better known as Beach Daze – knows that feeling well.
Five years after releasing his debut album, Broken Together, he's not interested in outrunning the person who made it. He's just grateful he gets to walk the same path.
Gualano was still figuring out who he was when that first record came out. Since then, he has graduated from William Patterson University where he immersed himself in music production education, both inside and outside of the classroom, and spent years redefining not only his sound but the way he approaches making music altogether.
The shoegaze textures and dreamy melodies reminiscent of Mac DeMarco and Rex Orange County remain, but the perspective behind them has changed.
"I think the biggest thing that's changed in the last five years is going from a more collaborative project to now it's more of me doing mostly all the work," Gualano said. "I feel like maybe now, in the past year, I've finally gotten to that point."
Back then, Beach Daze wasn't a pseudonym for Anthony, it was a blanket for a group of people.
Gualano wrote the instrumentals while other musical friends supplied much of the album's lyrics and melodies, each bringing their own perspective to songs shaped by isolation, uncertainty and the strange stillness of COVID as a growing teenager.
Looking back, he doesn't see his reliance on collaboration as a weakness. Instead, he sees it as an important beginning.
"I wasn't really confident in singing yet," he explained. "I didn't really know what I was going to write about lyrically."
Five years later, collaboration hasn't disappeared from his life, it has simply changed. What was once a necessity has become a creative choice.
Today, Gualano still welcomes musicians into his process, whether it's adding an instrument or contributing backing vocals, but Beach Daze has gradually become a project led by his own songwriting.
Graduating college this spring marked another turning point, one that feels surprisingly familiar. Gualano compares it to every other chapter he's left behind — from finishing high school to leaving the music academy where he learned his first guitar cords.
"I'm trying to be more optimistic about it," he said. "Sometimes it's scary, but then on the optimistic side, it's like, 'What's going to happen?' It's exciting."
Despite everything that's changed in his personal and professional lives, Gualano doesn't look back on Broken Together with embarrassment. If anything, he appreciates it more now than he did then.
"That's how I see Broken Together," he said. "It's like a time capsule of a very different part of life."
Five years after that first album, Gualano isn’t trying to recreate the musician he was when he made it. He’s more interested in seeing where the next version of Beach Daze can go. The boardwalk busker, the college student and the seasoned producer all exist in the same project now – just with a little more time, a little more confidence and a lot more music still ahead.