I am a person who owns a guitar named Sunday and a dying pothos named Lazarus and an apartment that smells permanently of cold coffee and recording cable plastic. I grew up in a small Southern town but I grew up in the church of that town, which means I grew up in air conditioning and potlucks and paved parking lots, not in the woods. Camping was not a thing my family did. My aunt Deb kept chickens and that was as feral as our household ever got.
The "camp setup" trend on TikTok has been going strong all fall, I've been watching it from my couch, posting about it, falling into a rabbit hole of gear reviews and firestarting tutorials and people setting up tents in national parks at golden hour and honestly? something cracked. I looked up from my phone, at my studio equipment and my acoustic guitar and my one slightly unwell pothos, and thought: I should just go do this.
So I did. I borrowed a tent from someone, bought exactly the wrong amount of food, drove three hours to a campground I found by typing "camping near me not fancy" into a search bar, lost cell service approximately forty minutes from the site, and proceeded to spend the most disorienting and genuinely wonderful forty-eight hours I've had in a long time.
Here is everything I know now, which is significantly more than what I knew going in.
The Gear: What I Actually Had
The camp setup TikTok trend is dominated by two aesthetics: extremely organized ultralight backpacking rigs that look like they were designed by engineers on a budget, and extremely cozy car-camping spreads with rugs and string lights and a cast iron skillet that looks like it has been seasoned by generations. I was aiming for the second one and landed in something more like a third category: improvised city-person setup with several critical oversights.
What I had: a borrowed two-person tent (borrowed from someone who warned me the zipper sticks, which was accurate), a sleeping bag rated to 40 degrees that I purchased three days before the trip, a small flashlight I found in my junk drawer, Sunday the guitar in her hard case, one notebook and four pens because I overestimate how much I'll write and refuse to let this bother me, two cans of beans, a bag of trail mix, six granola bars, a gas station bag of those little mini hot dogs you eat cold out of the packet, and a completely useless amount of citronella candles for bug control.
What I did not have: a can opener (for the beans), a way to start a fire without matches (of which I had one book, which got slightly damp), any understanding of how tent stakes work in rocky soil, or a pillow. I used Sunday's case as a pillow, which is not as comfortable as it sounds but is not as bad as you might expect either.
The camp setup TikTok people have things like headlamps with red-light modes for preserving night vision and compact water filtration systems and modular cooking kits. I had the cold mini hot dogs. In retrospect, the cold mini hot dogs were fine. Future camping trips will have better food. This trip had its own logic.
The No-Signal Situation
The thing I didn't fully anticipate: losing signal isn't a gradual thing in the mountains. It's a cliff. One minute you have two bars and a text from someone, and then you turn a corner on a gravel road and the bars are gone and they don't come back.
My first instinct (and I'm telling you this because honesty is all I've got) was mild panic. Not about safety, but about the familiar ambient hum of connectivity being gone. No notifications. No pull to check anything. The phone was just a device with a camera and a flashlight and a music library, which is what it is at its most honest, and suddenly I could feel how much of my daily nervous system is organized around its other functions.
The panic lasted about an hour. Then something happened that I don't have a great word for. The background noise in my head, which I had always assumed was just what brains do and thus was not remarkable, went very quiet. Not silent. The fire was loud. The woods were loud in ways I wasn't expecting: birds at dusk doing a whole production, insects, something rustling in the trees that I chose to believe was a harmless squirrel and not anything more alarming. But the internal noise, the low-level hum of things I hadn't done and notifications I hadn't answered, went quiet.
And in that quiet, two songs that I'd been trying to write for six weeks basically fell out of me in a single evening.
writing songs by a fire with no signal
I want to be careful not to make this sound more mystical than it was. I did not have a spiritual experience in the forest. I had a practical creative experience that makes total logical sense: I removed all the interruptions and the interrupted thing started flowing again. That's it. That's the whole mechanism.
The record I'm working on is full of material that requires sustained emotional attention, stuff about belief and loss and anger and identity and the specific flavor of grief that comes from an entire worldview coming apart. Writing that material in a studio apartment while also being a person who is online and reachable and context-switching constantly is genuinely hard. The recording sessions go well. The writing sessions, the ones where I'm staring at a lyric that isn't landing and need to find my way into the real center of what the song is about, those get interrupted. Constantly. By everything.
Sitting in front of a fire with Sunday in my lap and no reason to pick up my phone, I found the center of two songs I'd been circling for a month and a half. One of them I'd had a title for but no verse. The other one I thought was finished and wasn't. I found the missing piece in the second verse while poking a log with a stick at about 11pm and watching the sparks go up. You'd think the sparks were metaphorical. They weren't. I was genuinely distracted by the sparks and then the lyric arrived while I was looking at them, which is the most frustrating and inevitable thing about how the creative brain works.
I wrote both sets of changes in my notebook by flashlight. My handwriting, which is bad under the best circumstances, was illegible in several places by morning. I transcribed what I could read and accepted the mystery of the rest. Sometimes the subconscious writes in a dialect you can't fully translate.
the mistakes I made and will make again differently
In the interest of the camp setup tradition, which is fundamentally a genre of practical information sharing and I respect that, let me list what I'd do differently.
Get a headlamp. The flashlight means you only have one hand free at all times, which is fine until you need to cook something or find a stake you dropped or read handwriting you made four hours ago in worse lighting than this. A headlamp is both hands free. This is worth its thirty dollars more than anything else on the gear list.
Bring a can opener. This seems embarrassing to include but here we are. Cold mini hot dogs got me through two days and I'm not complaining about cold mini hot dogs but I had a can of black beans that remained theoretically available and practically inaccessible for forty-eight hours and this is a solvable problem.
The sleeping bag was right. 40-degree rating for an October night in the mountains is correct. I was slightly cold at 4am but not miserably cold, and "slightly cold at 4am" is both normal camping and an acceptable writing-conducive mental state.
Bring Sunday somewhere a hard case can rest against a tree. She traveled well. The case is scratched now in one new place, which she is handling with grace. Sunday has survived worse. Sunday has been through things.
Going Back
I came home from forty-eight hours in the woods with two new songs in draft form, a sunburn on my forearms that I did not anticipate needing sunscreen to avoid at an October campsite, an unreasonable amount of pine needles in my sleeping bag, and the clear sensation of having reset something important.
The apartment felt different when I walked back in. Smaller and more mine at the same time. I looked at Lazarus, who had survived my absence without catastrophe, and told him he was doing great. I made coffee. I opened my notebook. The songs were still there, which is always the anxious question: are the things you wrote in altered conditions still real when you're back in normal ones? They were real. They were better than I'd thought, actually. The fire-and-no-signal version of my brain had found some things the studio version had been avoiding.
I'm going back next month. I will have a can opener and a headlamp and probably a slightly better sleeping situation for Sunday's case. And I will leave my phone in the car when I get to the no-signal turn. The quiet it makes, that particular quality of silence where your brain finally stops simulating the internet and starts just being where it is, is the most useful creative tool I have found in a long time.
I don't know if the songs would have happened in the studio. They might have gotten there eventually. But they happened in one evening by a fire, and now they exist, and they're going on the record. That feels like enough of a reason to go back.