The San Diego Trolley, Dan Croll, & A Scene That Became Fiction 🚃

On May 3, 2014, I tagged along with the team from A Trolley Show for an intimate acoustic performance with Dan Croll and his band on board the San Diego Trolley. Squeezed into a trolley car, sun pouring through the windows, Dan and the band played "Maway" — and it's a morning I've never forgotten.

I didn't know it at the time, but that morning — the sunlight, the trolley packed with fans, an artist playing songs just for the people in that car — became one of my favorite scenes in Musical Awakening.

In the book, June Snow spends a morning on the San Diego Trolley with Richmond Adams during an intimate acoustic show — right down to the sun-soaked windows and the ocean breeze. It's one of the quietest, most personal moments in the story, and it all started with a real morning, a real trolley, and a song called "Maway."

Huge thank you to the awesome guys at A Trolley Show for letting me tag along on their Dan Croll shoot back in 2014 — it was a blast, and clearly left more of a mark than I realized at the time! If you love intimate acoustic performances, head over to their YouTube channel for tons of amazing sessions.

If you've read Musical Awakening, you'll recognize this scene — and if you haven't yet, this is a little glimpse of where some of the book's most personal moments came from!

This isn't the only real moment that found its way into Musical Awakening — read about the night that became the emotional core of the entire book in You Were My Lamplight: Saying Goodbye to A Silent Film.

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My debut novel Musical Awakening is now available on Kindle.

If you love:

🎶 Music-inspired stories 

🎶 Slow-burn romance 

🎶 Travel and creative ambition 

🎶 Daisy Jones vibes

Check it out here → Musical Awakening