Generational Head Butt:

This morning I went looking for one of my own songs.

That sounds simple enough.

In 2024, I released a song called “Coconut Water” under the name Candace Love. The song grew out of a poem I had written, based on a true story recounted to me during a hike, about a sweet, sensual moment in Copacabana, Brazil.

Two people meet near the beach. He offers her coconut water. She is suspicious. He is persistent. They talk. They sit on the beach. Eventually they go swimming in the Atlantic.

They kiss in the ocean.

The full moon rises.

She loses an earring in the water and decides to think of it as an offering to Nature in return for Love.

That was my Coconut Water.

So this morning I typed the title into a search engine, expecting to find my song.

Instead, I met Trim.

Trim is a young rapper who released another song called “Coconut Water” in 2026.

And hers has blown up.

Millions of streams. TikTok. Memes. Search results everywhere.

Naturally, I listened.

Then I looked up the lyrics.

Oh my.

Let’s just say we’re not sitting under a full moon on Copacabana Beach contemplating the mysteries of love.

The lyrics are sexually explicit, deliberately provocative and about as far removed from my Coconut Water as I could possibly imagine.

My first reaction was:

Oh no!

Then another feeling crept in.

Sadness.

Nobody owns the words “Coconut Water,” of course, and I have no reason to believe Trim ever heard my song. Other than the title, the two compositions have essentially nothing in common.

What bothered me was something else.

I was watching the machinery of the modern internet at work.

Her Coconut Water belongs naturally to the world that discovered it: explicit, provocative, meme-ready and viral.

Mine came from somewhere else entirely. Two years earlier, a poem about a romantic memory had become a song.

And now these two completely unrelated Coconut Waters had collided on my computer screen.

The algorithm practically answered:

No, no. You must mean THIS Coconut Water.

And that’s when I realized what I was feeling.

I come from a world in which you experience something, remember it, write about it, perhaps turn the memory into a poem, and eventually turn that poem into a song.

Life → memory → poem → song.

Increasingly, popular music exists in an entirely different ecosystem:

Song → clip → meme → algorithm → millions of plays.

Head butt!

Of course, neither sequence automatically makes a song good or bad.

Trim belongs to a generation with its own language, humor, sexuality, rhythms and ways of communicating. A young artist doesn’t owe a 71-year-old songwriter from the “Jones Generation” a song that conforms to her ideas of romance.

And I don’t owe anybody the pretense that I like lyrics different from mine.

That’s part of the generational head butt, too.

What really got under my skin, though, were those enormous numbers.

Millions of streams can start to look like millions of votes.

This is what people want.

This is what’s good.

This is what matters.

But stream counts tell only one part of the story.

Virality measures circulation extraordinarily well.

Music carries other kinds of value that don’t fit neatly into a stream count: tenderness, memory, storytelling, the strange power of a melody to preserve a moment in time.

A song can carry something that really happened.

And years later, it can bring back the smell of the ocean, the temperature of the air, or the person who once handed you a coconut.

Then curiosity got the better of me.

How many songs called “Coconut Water” could there possibly be?

A lot.

I started looking and quickly found more than twenty recordings carrying the same title.

Desmond Dekker & The Aces had a “Coconut Water” way back in 1968.

Nia Sultana released one in 2019.

There were Coconut Waters in 2020, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Several of us released songs called Coconut Water in 2024.

More appeared in 2025.

And Trim isn’t even the only artist to release one in 2026.

So much for planting my flag in the coconut.

Nobody stole my title. We apparently all showed up at the same refreshment stand.

That made the situation considerably funnier.

It also clarified what had been bothering me.

The remarkable thing wasn’t that somebody else had written a song called Coconut Water.

Lots of people had.

The remarkable thing was that, from this whole ocean of Coconut Waters stretching back decades, the machinery of the internet had suddenly selected one particular 2026 song and effectively announced:

This is what “Coconut Water” means now.

At least until the next one comes along.

Still swimming in feelings, I went over to YouTube.

I thought perhaps I could change the title of my song to “Coconut Water (2024)”, planting my little historical flag in the sand.

Nope.

The YouTube version is an automatically generated music release supplied through my distributor, Symphonic Distribution. I can’t simply go in and change its title.

But while I was there, poking around and feeling sorry for my poor little Coconut Water buried beneath the algorithmic avalanche, I noticed something.

A comment.

I had somehow missed it.

Seven months ago, a listener named Genevieve had written:

“Omg how hasn’t anyone commented on this before also this is amazing.”

I smiled.

And suddenly the whole morning looked a little different.

There it was.

One comment from one listener.

Genevieve had somehow wandered across my little song, listened to it, and liked it enough to wonder why nobody else had said anything.

The millions of streams I’d been contemplating all morning suddenly had some competition.

Because here was something a number couldn’t quite express: a human being had heard my song, felt something, and reached back.

Maybe that’s what the numbers sometimes conceal.

Don’t misunderstand me. If ten million people suddenly streamed my Coconut Water tomorrow, I would be delighted.

I’d probably dance around the house.

But somewhere in the world, one person heard my song and thought:

This is amazing. Why isn’t anybody talking about it?

She wrote that seven months ago.

She couldn’t possibly have known that one morning in August 2026, I would go looking for my own Coconut Water, encounter an entirely different Coconut Water with millions of plays, read some lyrics that made my eyes pop out, and wonder whether the world had left my kind of songwriting behind.

And there was Genevieve, waiting for me.

A little message in a bottle.

Maybe that’s the lesson I needed this morning.

The algorithm hadn’t really stolen my Coconut Water.

Mine was right where I left it.

There was Copacabana Beach.

There was coconut water.

There were enormous Atlantic waves.

There was a first kiss in the ocean.

There was a full moon rising over the water.

And somewhere beneath those waves is an earring I once decided was an offering to Nature in return for Love.

That became a poem.

The poem became a song.

And eventually the song reached Genevieve.

Life → memory → poem → song → listener.

And guess what? I discovered a new musical artist who knows how to make a splash - Trim. You go, girlfriend!

“Coconut Water” by Candace Love was released in 2024 and is based on an original poem by Patty Mooney.