Alex Chaiet lost her Pacific Palisades home in January 2025. Eighteen months later, the 17-year-old Santa Monica High School senior has a music video on YouTube for "Palisades," an original pop song she wrote days after the fire destroyed her neighborhood.

The video dropped the week of Saturday, July 12, joining a Bandcamp release that went live January 7, exactly one year after the fire erupted. The track also landed on Spotify and Apple Music. The video was filmed on the same deck along The Strand where Chaiet first picked up her guitar and wrote the song.

"It kind of poured out of me," Chaiet told Clique Magazine.

After losing their home, Chaiet's family stayed in a friend's house on The Strand for six months. It was there, looking out at the sunset, that she channeled her grief into five minutes and 22 seconds of pop. The song doesn't dwell on destroyed property. Chaiet wrote on her Bandcamp page that it's "more so about the community and memories that we lost."

The lyrics bear that out. She sings about the ice cream shop where her dad took her and her sister Payton every Saturday ("Now it's just ash"), an Italian restaurant with Arnold Palmers by the stone fireplace every winter break, and watching the neighborhood burn on the news at 3 a.m.

Chaiet's story sits inside a larger recovery still unfolding across the Palisades. The January 2025 fire destroyed 6,822 structures, including more than 5,500 residences, and killed 12 people, according to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection. Palisades Charter High School reopened its campus in January 2026 after more than a year of displacement, though enrollment dropped from 2,900 to 2,450 students.

Chaiet started writing songs in elementary school after getting her first guitar. Her music teacher, Lonnie Martinez, pushed her toward originals early. "The only way you're going to be different is if you write music," Martinez told her. Years later, the two collaborated on "Palisades," bringing the relationship full circle, according to the Santa Monica Sun.

The song was produced and mixed by Ainjel Emme and recorded by Kayla Dewitt and Emme at Pen Station Studios in Santa Monica.

Chaiet's mother teaches in the Santa Monica public schools. The family lives in the area while Chaiet heads into her senior year at Samohi. On her Bandcamp bio, she says she has written hundreds of songs waiting to be released.