bradford walters
brad and i became fast friends in 2003, 9th-grade homeroom. as first bell rang, he loved to play an “air raid dub” of darude’s sandstorm (yeah, that was still a newish track) full blast above the dean’s office and jump off the second-story breezeway to run to first period. he taught me how to tuck and roll.
he showed me a song called “let’s talk about spaceships,” and i still miss our extremely serious freshman musings about aliens. our friendship grew stronger through high school and well beyond. we surfed together. we created together. we made music together, calling ourselves “los dos.”
brad was the kind of friend who, no matter how much time passed, always felt close. even as the years scattered us, a call or a text was all it took, and suddenly five years of silence could feel like five minutes. we could always find the grooves of our friendship, drop the needle, and the music between us would start playing again.
this page is where i’m collecting what i can find of his minimalism and revolt against digitalism. here is a small tribute to an artist, an athlete, a brother, a son, a friend, a human tour de force. the brightest star in a constellation everyone looks up at and recognizes, and smiles. miss you brad.
la chanille dansante, 2024, france. credit: nobodysurf
los dos + grant kittrell, 2011, 29th st. jax beach
i stumbled across these two recordings brad and i must have made the fall after high school in 2006. back then i’d commute from south carolina and jacksonville beach often to surf, see friends, and apparently sometimes hit record.
we called ourselves los dos. i found these buried in a 128mb thumb drive, in a folder with the grand title: the extravagant adventures of time through the seasons of november.
i could get poetic, saying how listening to it now is like catching a brief echo of youth, of friendship, the unpolished magic of experimentation. but really it was just us playing guitars, having fun.