Pages tagged “tristan prettyman”

Girls, don’t believe everything you saw in Blue Crush. “As a surfer growing up, you really worry that Hollywood’s gonna take that and just destroy the presentation of female surfing for the rest of the world,” grouses Tristan Prettyman about the 2002 flick, who’s been riding waves competitively since she was 12. Her career has recently taken a dramatic left turn into the smoky folk-rock of Twenty-Three, her Virgin debut. But the ocean is still in her blood, she says.

Don’t watch Blue Crush and think you can do it, too.
Prettyman (who is—you guessed it—23) first hung ten when her junior high school offered surfing as an extracurricular activity, alongside P.E. and cooking. “I thought ‘I wanna learn how to surf, because there are no girls doing that,’” she recalls. So her father, an ex-board designer, gave her lessons every Saturday until she took fifth place in a statewide competition. Now, she says, as a result of Blue Crush, “there’s this whole wave of women wanting to learn, but it’s not like joining some soccer team.” And the thing about surfing is, you can’t learn it like any other sport. You can’t learn all the rules and positions and then better your game—it’s just this everlasting thing you do. And it doesn’t matter how many times you go out or how good you are one day—it’s always testing you.”

Other vocations may enter your life but surfing doesn’t leave you.
“I’m not really a surfer who plays music [like] Jack Johnson, because I don’t feel like my music is very surfy at all,” says Prettyman, who dropped out of college to pursue music once her acoustic-strummed sonnets (which do contain oceanic metaphors) began wowing not only Johnson—who offered career advice—but coffeehouse crowds, too. “So I’ve gone from competing to now just surfing for fun. And every time I’m home, I realize how necessary going surfing is. Even if the waves are bad, just to be able to sit and meditate out there is absolutely essential to me.”

Cowabunga! You can compose out there! Well, sort of …
The vibe on the open water is so peaceful that Prettyman often composes songs while bobbing along. “But I forget them all,” she frowns. “I’ll start singing in the water and I’ll try and write it down, sketch the idea in my wax. But it never works. So that’s what I really wanna do—make an invention with wax where you can write on your surfboard out in the water!”