Makua has stared down towering walls of water at Jaws and Cloudbreak, but the most dangerous drop of his life didn’t come from the ocean. It came quietly — in the form of pills, alcohol, injury, and a version of himself he barely recognized.
“I just needed to change or I was going to die,” he says now, blunt and unflinching.
There was a time when Makua couldn’t even perform his own stunts — a devastating admission for a lifelong waterman known for charging the heaviest waves on the planet. After blowing out his knee and undergoing surgery, doctors warned him he might never surf the same again. Instead of healing, he spiraled. He was overweight, out of shape, numbing pain with pills and alcohol. “I was so out of shape, I couldn’t even do my own stunts for the first time in my life,” he recalls. “I had to hire Love Hodel and these guys to do the stunts for me because I honestly couldn’t do them.”
Then came the moment that forced a reckoning.
While filming a television project, Makua portrayed a washed-up forty-year-old champion surfer who dies in the ocean. Watching that scene unfold hit too close to home. “When I saw myself die in that film, I said, ‘That’s going to be me if you don’t wake up.’” It wasn’t metaphorical. He believed it. “I believe if I didn’t choose this path, I would have drowned surfing.”
That was the catalyst. The decision wasn’t about trophies or reputation. It was survival.
Rather than sink deeper into self-pity, he picked up a pen. “When I made the decision to put all the garbage down and pick up the pen and write about it, it made a huge impact on my life,” he says. Music became rehabilitation — emotional, spiritual, physical. “I could either sit there and self-loaf and feel sorry for myself and do more pills and more drugs, or I could do the opposite and write about it.”
What came out of that process was raw, unfiltered truth. Makua doesn’t romanticize his past. “Excuse my language, but I was a motherfucker — and not just to other people, but to myself.” Sobriety, for him, wasn’t just about abstaining. It was about self-respect. “Self-love really keeps you away from that stuff,” he says. “It’s always going to be there… You can’t hide from it.”
That clarity bleeds directly into his new single, “Catch a Wave,” a collaboration with AWOLNATION. Originally inspired by the drowning of a fellow surfer, the track took on a deeper resonance for Makua, especially the line “Catch a Wave to Heaven.” “I was about to catch a wave to heaven,” he admits. The phrase became both tribute and warning — honoring those lost in the surf while acknowledging how close he came to joining them.
Now, instead of self-destruction, he channels that energy into connection. “I aim to help others impact their lives as well,” he says. The ocean is still central — it always will be — but the mission is bigger than any single swell. It’s about culture, community, and staying alive long enough to ride the next set.
Makua survived his undertow. And in “Catch a Wave,” you can hear him paddling hard toward something brighter — not chasing death anymore, but choosing life.
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