I want to start this one with something I don't usually say out loud: Fort Myers Beach broke my heart twice. Once in September 2022, when Hurricane Ian took almost every building I grew up visiting. And once again in the long quiet that followed — the years where the sand was still there and the sunsets were still perfect, but the town felt like a mouth that couldn't remember the word for itself.
Jack and I started Casamoré during that quiet. Not because we had a business plan — we didn't — but because we needed somewhere to play, and nobody else was going to build a dance floor on a beach that had just been flattened. So we built one. A small one. And we told anybody who'd listen that we were going to put a silent disco on the sand at sunset and call it A House of Love, and the first night, eleven people showed up. Eight of them were my relatives.
That was almost three years ago. The town is a different town now. The pier is back. Nervous Nellie's is back. The Times Square clock is back. The little candy store on Estero Boulevard is back, and the owner remembers my order, which is the thing that made me cry the first time I stopped in after it reopened. You can stand in the sand now and count, in any direction, more open businesses than closed ones. That sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing.
Casamoré's sunset series is a quiet part of this. I know that. We're not the chamber of commerce. We're two guys with a crate of headsets and some decks. But at our last two sunsets, I saw people in their 60s dancing next to people who've lived here their whole lives dancing next to people who just moved down. And the sunset was free. And the town's name came up in the second sentence of every conversation. 'We drove down from Tampa for this.' 'My cousin wouldn't shut up about Fort Myers Beach.' 'We hadn't been back since the storm.' 'We forgot how good the light was.'
That's what 'the town is back' sounds like. It doesn't sound like a press release. It sounds like somebody whispering it to a friend on a dance floor at 7:42 pm with the sun sitting on the horizon and a pair of headphones full of house music on their ears. A House of Love, we call it. But what we're really doing is welcoming people back to a house that a lot of us thought we were never going to get to host in again.
If you're local, thank you for still being here. If you're from somewhere else, come down. The beach is open. The light is as good as it ever was. And we're going to be on the sand on May 26, playing records until the last color leaves the sky, and we would very much like to see you.