📩 In Today’s Email

• TL;DR – Music isn’t just background, it’s the map, the memory, and the heartbeat of the road. Celebrating issue 25!

• The Deep Dive – Music and traveling: how songs become memory, anchor, and motion.

• The Read – The Storyteller by Dave Grohl + his own reinvention prompts.

• The Stream – 25 road songs (Spotify playlist).

• The Gear – My Casio CT-X800 keyboard; pianos are for slomads

📢 Newsletter News

1. ATN has crossed 1250 subs for Issue 25! (🎤 drop).

2. Digital Nomad Visa news:

   • 🇵🇭 Philippines – Now offering a 12-month digital nomad visa, perfect for island-hopping creatives.

   • 🇸🇮 Slovenia – Launching a brand-new visa this November — EU access with alpine flair.

   • 🇳🇿 New Zealand – Loosening regulations to welcome remote workers long-term, no special visa needed.

🤿 The Deep Dive - The Soundtrack of the Journey

Music and travel go together like, well, music and travel.

Since the days of wandering minstrels, bands have been nomads. Since the Walkman, travelers have scored their journeys with sound. Heartbeat and footsteps turn into rhythm. Rhythm turns into melody. And melody becomes the memory of a place.

Maybe this is the simplest truth:

You don’t really know someone until you’ve heard their mixtape.

In As Good As It Gets, Jack Nicholson’s character is borderline insufferable, until you learn he makes mixtapes. Suddenly, you believe he might have a soul. Music is a tell. A window. A confession.

This is the soundtrack of a life in motion.

I believe in what Grohl calls his “Dewey Decibel System.” Yes, it’s a terrible pun. But when you’ve played stadiums and finished shows on a broken leg, you’ve earned the right to name your philosophy.

Every place I’ve lived or lingered has left a track behind. Some songs clung to me like jet lag. Others dropped into my headphones like fate. And a few still echo when I land somewhere new.

• Los Angeles – I wore out “Going to California” so many times my friend threatened to leave me on the shoulder of I-10. I asked for one more rewind. I meant it.

• Spain – On a bus out of Salamanca, I heard Tom Waits for the first time. “Step Right Up” hit like gravel in God’s throat. I stared out the window and tried to stay upright. Then the bus hit a car. Spain leaves a mark.

• Texas – Country by default. “The Road Goes On Forever.” “On the Road Again.” These songs didn’t ask for permission. They just rolled through the static and stayed.

• New York – Run DMC, Nas, and Jay-Z. Volume up. Head down. Cities need anthems.

• Colombia – I knew of Juanes and Shakira before I landed. But the real soundtrack was the hum of reggaeton leaking out of taxis, balconies, clubs. Medellín pulses.

These aren’t just songs. They’re timestamps. Anchors. Postcards that sing.

The Devices that Carried Us

We carried our music across continents and formats. MiniDiscs. Walkmen. Burned CDs in soft zip sleeves. iPods that felt like sacred relics. Now we stream from the clouds.

Mixtapes were love letters.

CDs were armor.

A playlist could save your day. Or reroute your trip entirely.

Whatever we had, we turned it up louder when we felt lost.

The more I travel, the more I believe this: music and food are the fastest ways into the soul of a place. Not the language. Not the history. The songs and the spices.

You don’t understand a city until you’ve heard what people sing when they’re drunk, heartbroken, or dancing.

Every city has its own time signature.

Medellín pulses.

Madrid drawls.

Florence waits between notes, like frescoes drying on chapel ceilings.

Sometimes, all it takes is one song, a late-night riff in the background of a bad day, and suddenly the whole city makes sense. You’re not just passing through anymore. You’re in tune.

You’ve got your soundtrack, too. Maybe it’s buried in old playlists. Maybe it’s still looping in your head.

Cue it up. Let it take you back to the cities, the people, the chaos, the quiet.

Then hit record.

Because the next track is yours to write

🤓 The Read - The Storyteller by Dave Grohl

A Rock Memoir for the Reinventors

A few weeks ago, a trusted friend, my ATN book scout and future novel editor, sent me a message from London:

“You need to read Dave Grohl’s book.”

This is the same friend who tipped me off to Greenlights by McConaughey, a book that lit a fuse in the ATN community. She was right then. She’s right now.

Grohl, like McConaughey, is cut from a rare fabric.

Let’s call it “McConocloth.”

It’s a little ragged, a little feral, but threaded with conviction and stitched by people who refuse to compromise on the shape of their lives.

And obviously, whoever wears it, can’t go wrong.

Grohl ends The Storyteller with what he calls “Prompts.”

Prompt: What made you decide to grab life by the balls?

Grohl was that kid in Virginia who wasn’t just playing drums; he was summoning something. He tells a story about conducting a teenage séance to channel the ghost of Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. Was it absurd? Sure. But he believed it. And that belief was enough.

That same wild, obsessive energy got him into Nirvana just a few years later. He went from sleeping on floors to drumming on MTV, still surviving on gas station food and long-haul drives through the night.

High-agency move #1: Go all in. Even when it looks insane from the outside.

Prompt: What woke you up to your life?

For Grohl, it was music. For you, it might be writing. Or code. Or making films. Or furiously building LEGO amid a breakup.

Or maybe it’s building a high-agency nomad platform powered by AI and soaked in slomad philosophy. (Totally random example.)

The medium doesn’t matter. What matters is that flash where the world cracks open and you think, this is mine. This is what I want.

Grohl came up in the underground. DIY punk tours, $5 shows, duct-taped vans, sleeping on strangers’ floors. And he loved it.

That’s the part most people skip: the part before the audience shows up.

Nomad note: If you don’t love it before anyone’s watching, you won’t last once they are.

Prompt: Sift through your most important moments. Attach a song. Tell your story.

Reading The Storyteller is like listening to a mixtape in the dark. No strict chronology. Just groove, memory, emotional truth. He jumps between Nirvana, Foo Fighters, breaking his leg on stage and finishing the show anyway, raising kids, and getting bedtime stories read by Joan Jett.

Each chapter feels like a track. You know what’s coming, but you still lean in.

Try this: Choose three moments that shaped you. Match each to a song. See what patterns start to hum beneath the surface.

Prompt: What do you want to learn? How will you start if you don’t have the tools?

After Kurt Cobain died, Grohl could have disappeared. Instead, he picked up a guitar. He recorded the first Foo Fighters album completely alone. Every instrument. Every vocal. In secret.

He wasn’t trying to become a frontman. He was just trying to survive the silence.

That’s a high-agency pivot. No permission. No label. Just instinct.

You don’t need a title. You don’t need the right gear. You just need to start. Tools can be learned. Identity can be rebuilt.

Prompt: Start building. A song. A poem. A plan. Go.

Grohl is always building something. Not because he’s chasing legacy. Because he has to. That’s what creators do. They build in the dark. In garages. In gaps between gigs and grief.

The path doesn’t look like a ladder. It looks like a pile of noise, wires, and notebooks.

But every weird thing you make leads somewhere.

Stop waiting. Write the line. Hit record. Make the thing.

Grohl did.

Final Note

One minute Grohl was watching Nirvana explode. The next he was holding his best friend’s ashes.

That moment could have ended him.

Instead, it reformed him.

He doesn’t romanticize fame. He’s honest about burnout and grief. But he’s relentlessly grateful: for music, for family, for the tribe that pulled him back when things got dark.

The Storyteller isn’t a perfect memoir. It’s better than that. It’s permission.

Permission to go hard. To stay messy. To rebuild. To speak loud and off-beat and true.

If you’re creating something from the scraps of your own chaos, this book, and the man behind it, are part of your tribe.

McConocloth, baby. Wear it proud.

🍿 The Stream ATN’s 1st Playlist - Songs for the Road.

Every life needs a mixtape. These are a few of the songs that carried me across borders, bus rides, and fresh starts:

→ Listen to the full playlist on Spotify

The Gear - Casio CT-X800

A guitar is easier to sling on a shoulder, easier to play with your feet in the sand. But when I’m posted up for a while “slomad” style: I get one of these.

It’s nothing fancy. It’s not vintage or rare. But it holds still in a way that the road doesn’t. You travel to pianos, not the other way around. Usually, you can find one waiting to be played.

What keyboards can do these days is astonishing. The entire world’s encyclopedia of music is on this thing. Every beat from polka to reggaeton.

You don’t need a Steinway to write something true. Just enough melody to bring the world back into focus.

🛤️ Outtro

Reinvention begins not with where you land, but with what you make.

Every place is a blank page. What you write there? That’s your legacy.

If this newsletter sparked something, pass it on to a friend, a fellow explorer, or anyone rewriting their life.

This community grows through real connection. One story, one share at a time.

If you enjoyed this, share it.

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See you next week. Don’t Escape. Design.