I make good, steady money from my music. Good, because I like where it comes from. Steady, because it shows up every month.

But it is a very, very small amount of money.

Most of it comes from streaming. For example, from April to July of 2026, my dance-pop song about the Sustainable Development Goals, “We Love the SDGs”, was streamed over 1800 times. Most of that apparently came from people using my song in various short videos about the SDGs.

I earned a cool US $ 2.54 from all that streaming. At that rate, after half a year, I could buy a cafe latté. Maybe.

So let me explain why even these small amounts of money make me happy. Very happy indeed.

The data I receive on the sales of my music is very detailed. For your interest, I have included a sample from my dashboard below. I can quickly see which songs are most popular, and where, but not (fortunately) who is listening. Most of the action is in streaming, of course, but notice that I actually sold two songs — that is, someone paid money to download them so that they could own a digital copy. That is very unusual these days, at least for me.

One of the songs I sold this year is called “Dungeness,” and it is one of my personal favorites. It is a haunting (I say that because it haunts me) story sung from the perspective of a man living alone in the wilderness, many years ago. There is a link to listen to the song at the end of this article, but let me tell you about it first.

The man is in despair. He hikes down from his cabin in the Olympic Mountains, west of Seattle, to the sea — specifically, to Dungeness Spit, a narrow track of sand sticking 5 miles (8 km) into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which links the Pacific Ocean to Puget Sound. The man lays down in the sand, ready to give himself over to the waves, ready for his life to end. But he is given a vision: one night of genuine happiness. The experience does not restore his hope, indeed it leaves him feeling even more bereft. But somehow, it cures him of his despair and restores his will to live. After that one extraordinary night, he has learned to accept his fate — a fate he begins to see as universal — and prepares to return home. He has both gained and lost something precious; but he has acquired a new and lasting perspective on life’s essential mysteries, which he tries to capture in dreamlike images. Here is the final verse:

Now Time is a river of sand.

Time is a door with a lock you can’t pick,

or the salt in the palm of your hand.

Time is a wall that we build brick by brick,

and there’s nowhere to hide from

your own emptiness,

and I swore I would never return,

at Dungeness.

When I wrote this song, I could not have described it to you the way I did above. This was simply a story that came to me. It grew together with the melody and the guitar patterns, like a vine around a tree, inspired not by my own life circumstances but by walking at Dungeness. Standing on that uncanny strip of sand, sticking far out into the water. Feeling the wind in my face, the loneliness of it. Stumbling upon a seal cub looking sad and lost — but of course it wasn’t lost. Their mothers park them on the beach while they are out hunting.

Somehow this fictive gentleman’s story arrived in my mind as though from another time. It knocked on my door and requested politely to be told. So I took it in, and told it.

I often play “Dungeness” for myself, but it is not a song I performed often, when I was performing regularly. I personally find it heart-wrenching, and I was more often performing in the role of sustainability entertainer. Those audiences would have found “Dungeness” a downer.

But I love the song. And now, thanks to my musical dashboard, I can see that someone else liked it well enough, here in 2026, to spend a dollar or so on it, of which I receive 73 cents.

Those are 73 very precious cents. Those 73 cents tell me that someone else stumbled upon “Dungeness,” and gets it.

As a songwriter, those 73 cents made my day.

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“Dungeness” is a track from my debut album, “Testing the Rope,” released on the independent Rain City Records label in 1997. You can listen to it on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube, and many other streaming services. Or write to me if you would like a copy of the physical CD.