Illustration by Kate Evans/Folio Art
Until recently Chi McClean ’98 had spent much of his musical career searching for a sound that fit.
The journey led somewhere unexpected. A Long Island native now based in Nashville, McClean found his creative home in surf music — the instrumental, reverb-heavy genre rooted in 1960s California (think The Beach Boys meets the Pulp Fiction soundtrack).
On paper the pivot makes little sense; living in Music City, McClean is about as far from the ocean as he can be. And while he surfed as a kid on Long Island’s South Shore — a place he notes has “decidedly no waves, except during major storms” — the time he spent in the water left a lasting impression. Now, after years of working across genres, McClean’s latest projects signal a new chapter in his career and represent “the most fun I’ve ever had making music.”
Music has always been part of McClean’s life, even if it wasn’t initially his career plan. At Colgate he moved through several academic interests and majors — from studio art to geology — before ultimately settling on Spanish literature. Outside the classroom, he was immersed in the campus music scene, singing with The Colgate Thirteen, playing guitar in the student jazz ensemble, and fronting his own jam band, Flat Soul, whose biggest gig (along with many a frat party) was opening for rapper Coolio during 1995’s Spring Party Weekend.
After graduating he moved to San Francisco (“I was following a girl,” he says, laughing) and began writing and recording albums as a singer-songwriter and booking his own shows. Playing mainly acoustic roots-rock, McClean independently released three albums and spent years touring nationally, often logging more than half the year on the road. The grind paid off, earning McClean national radio airplay, a live in-studio performance on CBS’s The Early Show, and placements on Virgin America’s in-flight entertainment system.
Along the way, McClean supplemented his music career with work in early digital music distribution, which exposed him to the realities of how records are sold — and how often musicians are asked to balance creative instinct with commercial appeal. “You’ve got to wear a couple different hats, especially as an independent artist. It becomes more about what’s marketable,” he recalls. “I wanted to make something that spoke to me personally and artistically, whether it was commercial or not.”
That perspective shaped McClean’s next move. Beginning in the early 2010s, he started spending time in Nashville, drawn by the city’s songwriting culture, before relocating to the city permanently in 2019. It was there, far from the coast, that the surf project began to take shape. Working out of a home studio with no producer or deadline, McClean began experimenting and following ideas wherever they led. “I’d plug in a guitar, create a drumbeat, and think, ‘Oh, that’s pretty cool — what if I did this with it?’” he says. “I kept gravitating toward that surf sound. I liked creating that feeling, that vibe.”
What started as a creative outlet quickly became something more focused: a body of instrumental music rooted in feel and atmosphere rather than market expectations. Released in fall 2025 under the surf-rock project The Chi-Tones — and named after a surf break in Baja, Mexico — Salsipuedes reflects McClean’s “vibes-driven” approach and quickly found an audience on independent and specialty radio stations. McClean followed it in November 2025 with A Christmas Wave, a five-song holiday EP that reimagines familiar Christmas standards through the same reverb-heavy lens. He is already writing and recording new material for another release expected in 2026.
For McClean the musical shift isn’t about abandoning what came before, but about finally trusting what feels right.
“Once I focused on how it felt, everything clicked.”