Wash Me Away

Album: Wash Me Away (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • This atmospheric, evocative song hits on themes of renewal, with lyrics that read like poetry:

    When I wake up
    Will I find that the diggings of this excavation
    Have come to haunt me


    Old Sea Brigade (Ben Cramer) doesn't always know what his songs mean when he writes them. His process is mumbling sounds and then building the song around it.
  • Old Sea Brigade got a lot of attention on Spotify when his first single, "Love Brought Weight" (released in 2015), got added to popular playlists. "Wash Me Away" is the title track to his second EP, released two years later. "After every EP I started going out and playing more and more shows and that impacted me a lot as a performer," he said on the Songfacts Podcast. "I experimented a lot during those live shows. I would tour as a duo with my buddy Ben. We would experiment with interesting live sounds trying to see how much sound we could come up with as two people.

    With that, we would start jamming on these ideas that I would have from little guitar riffs, and 'Wash Me Away' came from that. Things went from me playing by myself to a band practice vibe, then going out and playing for people to test out how they reacted to those sounds.

    That whole time I was working with my friend Jeremy Griffith, who is a producer. I have to give him a ton of credit because he really helped me dial in on a sound that sounded like me. I worked with him on the first, second and third EP and then the album. He's been a big part of helping me refine and shape my sound over the years."

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