Santa Monica, Calif.

Prior to the sessions for his debut LP, Roberto Rodriguez had barely experimented with the electric 12-string guitar. But when producer Billy Mohler first suggested he play that instrument, a vintage Rickenbacker, he felt instant inspiration. “I’m not patting myself on the back, but I hadn’t picked that up before,” he says of the “1960-something” axe hanging around Mohler’s Los Angeles studio. “But [Mohler] was like, ‘Dude, record the 12-string.’ And that instrument became an [important] part of this album,” his first full-length under the name Coastal Clouds. That signature hazy jangle is part of Rodriguez’s songwriting DNA, carrying on the breeziness embedded in the canon of West Coast rock—a fitting aesthetic since the record’s sound coalesced in LA. The bilingual Rodriguez was born and raised in Puerto Rico, learning English in elementary school before moving to Orlando as a kid and later attending college in Tallahassee. But he got antsy after graduation, so instead of pursuing an expensive music mastering degree, he moved to California in search of real-life recording experience. He landed studio internships, surfed and skateboarded a lot, played folky acoustic shows, worked restaurant day jobs and bounced from apartment to apartment—“fringing it” a bit by living in his car (and occasionally “sneaking in” to sleep in the control room of a studio where he was assisting). Rodriguez eventually realized that, instead of engineering other people’s music, he’d rather hone his own. After meeting Mohler during a session and showing him some demos, he wound up signed to the producer’s emerging record label. “I had time to kill between work shifts,” he says of his early California days, before pinpointing the essence of his current project. “Between surfing and skating by the beach, I was pretty immersed in that West Coast vibe.”