"It shows my econo side and then my rock and roll side," he says of the Hondas and the Nova. "I have a family here at home and so I've got to do what's right, but I also love to have a car that's actually fun and has some character to it. Hondas are awesome, but they just don't have a whole lot of character."
His kids also love riding in the Nova. "It's their favorite thing. I interviewed my daughter, I said, 'What's you're favorite thing to do?' She said, 'Going for a ride in your Nova' was her favorite thing to do with her dad," he says. "I thought that was pretty cool."
Although he spends more money on guitars than cars, Shirley says, "This is a real highlight for me -- it's not often that a musician gets to be in a car magazine, so this is fun."
Shirley grew up in San Diego and learned to drive in a 1980 Mitsubishi pickup when he worked at his uncle's avocado grove in Temecula.
"I worked with him for a summer picking avocados here in Southern California, which was some of the hardest work I've ever done in my life," he says. "I would drive his stick-shift truck all over the grove and then we'd load it up with avocados and he'd let me drive it into town to drop off the avocados. I always felt like that was huge because I didn't even have a license yet and he taught me to drive on that. He just sold the grove last year, so it's a bummer."
Before that, Shirley and his three brothers used to go to their grandfather's home and drive the tractors around the backyard. "So we really grew up learning how to shift gears and learning how to drive on these tractors. "
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He was 14 when he was driving around the grove in the pickup. "That was my first experience driving on roads, he was with me and I was driving it all summer long."
When he got his license at 16, Shirley bought an automatic 1978 Pontiac LeMans, which was his high school car. "I bought it on Craigslist and drove it to the beach. I really got into surfing, so I was taking it on dirt roads to the beach and really tearing it up," he says.
He bought the car with money he saved up from the avocado work. "It was a 350 V-8 engine and it was really fun to drive on these dirt roads to and from the beach in high school, which is what my best memories of driving that car was - on the dirt road to the beach."
Shirley had the LeMans for three years and then his dad handed down one of his favorite cars he's ever owned, a manual 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon.
"It was just a complete surf car. It was in great shape, we drove it all over, and when I first started playing in my first band, we used that 1984 Volkswagen Vanagon to travel all over. We put all our musical gear in that thing and we took that all over the state. I was in another band for eight years called ATS before Switchfoot, so I was already touring a lot before I met the guys."
It was his band car for seven years. "I started playing music pretty young, so right when I went to college, I started bands. We were touring in that Volkswagen for a long time. I had such good memories there, so nostalgic. It's the car I probably will say I should never have gotten rid of it," he says.
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But when he bought the Nova and already had the Hondas, Shirley sold it because he felt he had too many cars. "The Vanagon was just sitting there and we got a tour bus. So we stepped up into larger 15-passenger vans with a trailer."
