The Secret Beach is the long-running musical home of Manitoba songwriter Micah Erenberg (AKA Karima Micah).

For well over a decade, Erenberg has been making records, touring, and building a body of work that exists largely outside the usual machinery of the music industry. Yet somehow, The Secret Beach has become part of the furniture. A favourite artist of your favourite artist. A name murmured outside a show. Your bandmate's favourite sweater.

The music itself is rooted in the Prairies, drawing equally from country music, folk songs, chicken shack rock n' roll, and the particular humour and melancholy of small-town life. Erenberg's writing is filled with characters you know, places you've been, roadside reflections, and the strange beauty of everyday life. The songs are thoughtful without being precious, funny without chasing punchlines, and often carry the feeling of a conversation that started long before the listener arrived.

The Secret Beach recordings tend to follow a similar philosophy. Rather than striving for perfection, they aim to capture a moment. Many were made in basements, garages, short-term rentals, and temporary studios assembled wherever Erenberg happened to be living at the time. The records are loose in spirit but carefully crafted, shaped by years spent obsessing over recording techniques and an unlikely friendship with legendary producer Rob Fraboni, who helped reinforce a belief in the intuitive spirit of recording as an art.

Along the way, The Secret Beach has quietly become a gathering place for an extended community of musicians. Longtime collaborator Daniel Diamond occasionally steps forward with songs and vocals of his own, while a revolving cast of friends and fellow travellers move through the recordings. The boundaries between band, studio, and social circle have always been intentionally blurry.

On stage, the line between audience and community often feels equally blurry. The rooms tend to fill with familiar faces, fellow artists, and curious newcomers who leave feeling like they've stumbled into something that was already happening before they arrived.

In 2025, The Secret Beach's album We Were Born Here, What's Your Excuse? received a JUNO nomination for Adult Alternative Album of the Year. For many artists, that might have felt like a turning point. For The Secret Beach, it felt more like a strange and welcome confirmation that the wider world had finally caught a glimpse of something that had already existed for years.

Today, the project remains as fluid as ever. On any given night, The Secret Beach might appear as a full band, a duo, or simply Micah alone with a guitar. New songs are constantly being written. New records are constantly taking shape. The studio moves around. The cast changes. The approach does not.

The goal has never been to chase success. Just to keep making things.

Whatever grows from that is what The Secret Beach becomes.