Note: The album containing this song doesn't drop until May 15, but if you're reading this, you found it early. Here's the song.
I wasn't there. I want to be upfront about that.
When WHTG was broadcasting out of a house on Hope Road in Eatontown, New Jersey, I was a teenager up in Morristown, out of range, living in a completely different corner of the state's musical universe. I had no idea the station existed. I didn't know what I was missing.
I found out years later, through a documentary — actually two of them, The Jersey Sound - watch it here and another that lives over at USA Today/Asbury Park Press (paywalled) or watch it directly on YouTube here. From the film's opening, I was completely grabbed. A scrappy little FM station, operating out of someone's actual house, run by people who cared so much about music that they brought records from home to put on the air. Who gave chances to unknowns. Who looked at what the big commercial stations in New York were doing and decided, consciously, to do something different.
That story grabbed me and wouldn't let go. It became a song and made me realize I was feeling compelled to write multiple songs inspired by the northern reaches of the Jersey Shore - from Eatontown to Asbury Park.
The house at 1129 Hope Road, Eatontown, NJ — home of WHTG. The house has since been demolished. (Screen grab from the documentary WHTG 106.3 FM: Modern rock radio and the house on Hope Road.)
What I kept coming back to wasn't nostalgia, exactly — I can't be nostalgic for something I never experienced firsthand. It was more like recognition. Asbury Park has always had this quality: people who show up with a vision, no permission, not much infrastructure, and a conviction that the music matters. WHTG was that, in radio form. A house on a street in Eatontown that became, for a while, the place where a certain spirit lived and broadcast outward.
The lyric that came first was "nobody really comes out of nowhere / we bring our stories where we go." That felt true of the station — every DJ, every record they played, every unknown band they took a chance on, arrived there carrying something. The house was just where all those stories converged and went out over the air.
One line from the documentary stuck with me so hard it ended up almost verbatim in the song. A DJ describing their own experience said they were "doing shows, not working shifts." I couldn't improve on it. So I didn't try. That's the whole distinction, isn't it? Between people who are there because they love it and people who are counting the hours. WHTG was all the former.
The chorus — "within the sound of the songs, beaming out of the house on Hope Road" — is meant to capture what radio does at its best. Not broadcasting at you. Beaming toward you. Finding you wherever you are in range of the antenna, and pulling you into a community you didn't know existed.
I wish it had found me as far north as Morristown then. I'm glad the story found me eventually.
"House on Hope Road" appears on Asbury Heart, releasing May 15, 2026. The album launch concert is at Porta in Asbury Park — get tickets here. The documentary that inspired this song: read the Asbury Park Press piece (paywalled) or watch it on YouTube.