Washed Out Made “Feel It All Around” When He Was Unemployed and Living With His Parents
Before his music ended up as the backdrop for the opening of IFC’s Portlandia, Washed Out spent his early years recording for himself and a small cohort of friends. Instead of uploading songs to iTunes or sending his work to record labels, he often chose to keep his music private. “I’ve been recording for years,” he told Adult Swim in 2012. “Just kind of under my own name. I would rarely even share it with anyone. You know, it was just to listen in my car.”
Then Washed Out’s music career took an unexpected turn in 2009. 26-years-old, recently engaged, and dealing with the aftermath of the financial crisis in 2007–08, he found himself living with his parents in an unemployed, directionless rut. “I don’t think it’s an exciting thing to move back in with your parents,” he said in a 2010 interview with Creative Loafing. “It wasn’t exactly depression, but it was some level of failure that I was dealing with.”
As an escape Washed Out took to recording music in his bedroom late at night, listening to his work through a pair of headphones to avoid disturbing his parents. It was during these melancholy late-night recording sessions that his sound started to evolve. “The melodies, those lyrics, they’re reminding myself to remain positive,” he told Creative Loafing. “I really didn’t have much going for me.”
“In your imagination you can perfect things in a way you can’t do in your everyday life.””
All of that changed one night as he listened to potential sample sources online and happened upon Gary Low’s “I Want You”, a catchy Italo disco hit from 1983. “I was downloading tons of stuff and I had never heard that track before,” Washed Out told ARTVOICE in 2011. “It was actually a hit in Europe and Italy in the early 1980s, but I was just thinking of it as a really good, kind of cheesy disco song.”
His curiosity piqued, Washed Out decided to see how the song sounded at a greatly reduced tempo. “I pitched it down — which you can’t really do with every song, but this song was recorded in such a way that the bass wasn’t too low pitched and it was really trebly,” he told ARTVOICE. “So slowed down it had this really cool quality about it.”
Though the process of creating a pitched down loop was rather simple, turning the loop into a fleshed out song was a bit of daunting process. “The hardest thing for me was trying to put together an interesting arrangement that changes,” Washed Out said in his ARTVOICE interview. “It is easy to get an interesting loop to happen, but it becomes a collage when the song and loop are constantly changing.”
“The melodies, those lyrics, they’re reminding myself to remain positive. I really didn’t have much going for me.”
After Washed Out completed “Feel It All Around” and a few other tracks that ended up on his Life of Leisure debut, he changed his MySpace profile from Ernest Greene to Washed Out and uploaded some of his work. Through the magic of the internet, the London-based No Pain In Pop blog found his musiic, leading to his eventual discovery on Pitchfork.
Having your work picked up by one of the biggest music websites in a matter of weeks might sound like a dream to some, but for Washed Out it was overwhelming at first. “Within a couple of weeks, my songs were all over the internet,” he recalled in a 2011 interview with The Guardian. “Then came the offers to play shows around the world.”
His music may have started out as a therapeutic way of dealing with the stresses of adult life, but the ensuing opportunities and daunting pressure to take his career to the next level brought their own kind of anxiety. “I was about to get married but had no real idea what to do with my life and I felt quite anxious about things in general,” he told The Guardian. “I think the music was a way of dealing with that…But when the live invitations came through, I got anxious again because I had this amazing opportunity but no idea how to start fulfilling it.”
With three full-length albums and two EPs released since 2009, Washed Out has more than fulfilled his opportunities in the time since “Feel It All Around” first came out. What started as a simple way to work through the sadness and uncertainty of adult life turned into a successful career beyond his wildest dreams. And in the years since Life of Leisure, music remains a therapeutic way for him to deal hard times. “I’ve struggled with depression before,” Washed Out told Pitchfork in 2013. “For me, music was always a very positive way to will myself out of that situation. In your imagination you can perfect things in a way you can’t do in your everyday life.”
Though other Washed Out projects have found success, “Feel It All Around” remains his most enduring work — a testament to the incredible beauty musicians create out of struggle and strife.
Connect with Washed Out on Facebook, Instagram, iTunes, Soundcloud, YouTube, his website, and on Twitter @ernestgreene.
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