The Morbid Bliss of Washed Out's "Weightless"
Drumming Upstream 9
Welcome back to Drumming Upstream! I’m now nine songs into learning how to play every song I’ve Liked on Spotify. That only leaves… uh… 472 more songs. Well, even if it doesn’t represent a marker of substantial progress in this project, this entry is its own kind of milestone. This is the first song that I’ve learned that I no longer like.
Side A
“Weightless”
By Washed Out
Paracosm
Released on August 13th, 2013
Liked on July 16th, 2015
For research for the ninth entry of Drumming Upstream I read nine contemporary reviews of Washed Out’s Paracosm. All nine reviews described Washed Out’s music as “chillwave.” Seven of them used “chillwave” in the first paragraph, three of those seven used “chillwave” in the first sentence, and one review of nine starts with the word “chillwave”. The ubiquity of the term dates these reviews to their era at least as forcefully as any of Ernest Greene’s songwriting choices date his work as Washed Out. Chillwave as a description is a relic of the late 00s and early 10s, referring to summery, independently produced electronic pop music from that same period. The term has little practical use in the present. However, this lack of critical utility comes not from the style’s disappearance in the ensuing years but from its sublimation into the rest of pop music. Audiences certainly haven’t lost their appetite for reimagined 80s synth pop, or for the pillowy-soft production style associated with Washed Out and co. If anything those hallmarks have become so commonplace in both Indie and mainstream music that giving them a bespoke genre tag is irrelevant.
“Chillwave” has also been rendered useless as a descriptor by the music that preceded it in history. With 2020s hindsight we can see that chillwave was just one crest of a much larger tidal current in pop music. Summer jams and soft rock for young urban professionals have existed for about as long as recorded music itself. Chillwave was only remarkable at the time because it was being made on laptops in a culture just years away from legal weed and for young urban professionals who were less upwardly mobile than horizontally static. So, in the ninth entry of Drumming Upstream, I am not going to use the nine letters c-h-i-l-l-w-a-v-e in sequence to talk about Ernest Greene’s music. Greene never asked for the tag, and he’s long outlasted it. Before I started working on this cover I wasn’t sure if Washed Out were still active. It turns out that Greene put out a new album in 2020. It’s called Purple Noon, and it makes his connection to yuppie music of yore all the more obvious by sounding a lot like Phil Collins and Sade, except, you know, worse. Washed Out are still touring, playing to even bigger crowds than they did in 2013, and more often than not playing to those crowds the song “Weightless”.
“Weightless” is the fourth track on Paracosm, Greene’s second album as Washed Out. By the time the album dropped in mid-August of 2013, Portlandia, the IFC hipster comedy series that used Washed Out’s “Feel It All Around” as its opening theme, was in between its third and fourth seasons. Greene had spent the three seasons that Portlandia had been on the air taking his own show on the road. Apparently invigorated by the experience of playing his previously digitally produced music in a live setting, Greene decided to record Paracosm using live instruments, hunting down Mellotrons, Ondes Martenots, Novachords and more to build his auditory day-dream. This was a significant change for Greene. Before Paracosm Greene wrote and recorded mostly using samples and synthesizers because Ernest Greene was a boy that made beats.
Briefly, a word on beats and the boys that make them. When I attended college in the late 00s, you were about as likely to meet a boy that made beats as you were to meet a boy that didn’t. Granted, I went to school for music, but crucially all types of boys made beats, not just the self-identified musicians. Any boy with a laptop was one google search away from a program he could make beats with. I know that I like to bag on the internet in this blog, but it was good that the barrier to beat making was lowered this way. Making it this easy to get started turned making beats from a niche subculture to a generalist hobby. A whole new swath of people could become musicians. This was good for music. That does not mean that the music was always good, of course. The music that dudes in college showed me in dorm rooms or at parties was frequently composed by admitted amateurs. Sometimes these amateurs were also blowhards. After running into enough guys unduly high on their own supply, my friend and I started lampooning them by droning “uhhhh I make beats” at each other at band practice.1 A lot of the beats these bros made were hip-hop beats or dance music, but some of them weren’t exactly either. What they were instead was often hard for me to say, which is why I’ll let Ernest Greene say it for me. “It’s kind of a naive take on dance music,” Greene told Adult Swim in a video interview, “People making dance music that didn’t grow up with dance music.”
To hear Greene tell it, his transformation from amateur beat maker to professional indie pop singer was never planned. The internet picked up on his stuff early on and he ran with it. The sense I get is that Greene never really got his reps in as a songwriter before Washed Out took off. Because of this, a lot of his music feels rich on vibes and thin on substance. Greene was already a good enough producer to work around this, using his layered voice as a melodic smear across the top of his tracks. I think this naive (Greene’s word) approach is part of Washed Out’s appeal. When I interviewed previous Drumming Upstream subject Marissa Nadler she joked about the stereotype of serious songwriters retreating to a cabin in the woods to work on music. Meanwhile here’s a young wholesome-cute married guy2 with a laid back Southern accent driving a boat around a lake by day and crooning nonsense into a reverb chamber at night. Who’d you rather hang out with?
At its best Paracosm is exactly the vacation from reality that Greene intended. Paracosm stretches the feeling of the first sip of a cocktail at midday in the shade into a 40 minute auditory experience. Greene’s blend of retro keyboards and dusty dance beats gives the album a feeling of a makeshift vacation. If the parents of Washed Out fans enjoyed Jimmy Buffet and trips to island resorts, Washed Out fans themselves made due with Greene’s hazy lo-fi approximation as a soundtrack to relaxing at home. For most of the record, Washed Out are much better than Greene’s “dance music for people who don’t know dance music” reduction.
The exception is “Weightless”. “Weightless” avoids dance music entirely, slowing to a half time crawl. If the rest of Paracosm is aiming for satisfied relaxation, “Weightless” is going for sheer bliss. All of Washed Out’s music to this point was stoner-friendly, but “Weightless” was the first real bone thrown to listeners that sought out Greene’s music specifically for its digital psychedelia. There isn’t a single sound on the song that isn’t either echoed or blurred into soft edges with reverb. Compared to the tracks on either side of it, “Weightless” sounds enormous, like diving straight into the lake instead of skimming over the top of it.
The songs leading up to “Weightless” imply an escape from real life into a dreamworld paradise. Birds chirp, harps flutter, and Greene’s curated collection of novelty keyboards evoke a carefree nostalgia that comes with stepping away from the present. The first three songs on the album are the journey out of the mundane, “Weightless” is the moment you arrive in the sublime. As synthesized arpeggios burble by, Greene sings with serene certainty that “you’ve waited all your life to leave it all behind.” What that “it” is doesn’t matter, whatever and whoever you were before “Weightless” is about to be washed away. The chorus swells and Greene harmonizes with himself, urging the listener to “forget about yourself… forget about the pain forever.” Greene tells you to “rise” and to “float” away from life, to “leave it all”. Were its production style not so thoroughly modern, “Weightless” could have been the jingle for Don Draper’s rejected Sheraton Hawaii campaign from season six of Mad Men:
“Heaven’s a little morbid! How do you get to heaven? Something bad has to happen.” - Don Draper, Mad Men Season 6 Episode 1: “The Doorway”
Nothing about Greene’s music or persona suggests this was intentional, but “Weightless” is a deeply morbid piece of music, closer in tone to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb” than the weed-flavored yacht pop that fills the rest of Paracosm. The song is a weighted blanket heavy enough to crush the listener’s sense of self. It is pop music as a narcotic, all the more insidious for its lack of self-awareness. Greene seems completely sincere when he beckons his audience to slip off their mortal coil. It isn’t uncommon for intentionally smooth music to be aspirational. Throwing on some sophisti-pop is a cheap way to feel rich, and nostalgic pop music is a more sure-fire way to visit an idealized past than even a real life time machine would be. Pleasant music that aspires towards death is much rarer. On “Weightless” Greene accidentally says the quiet implication of chill music too loudly. By escalating the stakes of escape from vacation to obliteration “Weightless” reveals an ugly desire to reject the necessary harshness of reality for a worry-free fantasy of pleasure.
But you can’t run from reality forever. When all of the weed haze dissipates and the reverb tail fades away, even the most passionate Washed Out fan has to acknowledge that at its core, “Weightless” is a hollow song. To explain what I mean, let’s flip over to Side B.
Side B
“Weightless”
Performed by Bradley Hagen
65-66 BPM (approx)
Paracosm was produced by Ben H. Allen. Allen, based in Atlanta, got his start in hip-hop in the late 90s before becoming the go-to guy for big name indie bands like Animal Collective, Neon Indian, and Deerhunter. Before producing the first two Washed Out records, Allen worked with drummer Bradley Hagen at least as early 2010 on the CeeLo Green album The Lady Killer. One of my favorite parts of doing this newsletter is learning weird liner note trivia like this. CeeLo Green and Ernest Greene had the same drummer. Finally a guy who can definitively say who’s side of the grass is greener.
Hagen sounds good on Paracosm, but he isn’t asked to do much on “Weightless”. Any time Hagen plays on the song his part is identical to a programmed drum pattern that repeats for the whole track. That programmed pattern never changes except for a short fill played the same way before each new section. There’s nothing wrong with keeping it simple, but what this tells us is that the drums are not the point. Rhythm in general is not the point on “Weightless”. Nearly every instrument hits on the downbeat and little else. This would normally make a song this slow sound sparse, or vast if you’re into that kind of thing, but Greene and Allen fill up the empty space by applying an echo on much of the track. Having each sound repeat like this has a way of de-emphasizing the importance of any one sonic '“attack”. Instead of moving from moment to moment it feels like we’re suspended in air.
Everything about “Weightless” from its tempo to its timbre is designed to keep that state of suspension safe. And when it works it sounds great! The wave of sound that crashes into you when the song kicks in is euphoric. Each new sound that Green adds as he builds towards the song’s first chorus blends right into the impressionistic fog of his production. Everything feels right. The trouble is that all of the choices that sustained this atmosphere drag the actual song down. The slow tempo stretches each section out for so long that Greene can only fit in two verses and two choruses before ending the song at a reasonable length. “Weightless” is one sequence of verse, pre-chorus, chorus that repeats with no change to the form. And because the balance of textures needs to be just-so for the song to work, nothing in the arrangement changes from one cycle to the next. Once Greene rises up in the chorus, the song has nowhere left to go, no higher levels of bliss to immerse the listener in.
The trick only works once. The second time around what felt ascendant about the song now flatlines. Washed Out sacrificed dynamics for the easier win of a good first impression. When you watch me play the song in the video below, see if you can tell when I got bored.
Given the layers of effects on Hagen’s drums, I had to make a few adaptational choices that make my part different than what he likely played in the studio. First, I decided to use mallets instead of normal drum sticks so that my hits on the cymbals would have less attack and more body. The mallets also softened the snare drum a bit, which made it closer to the ‘verb’d out snare on the recording. Next, I added ghost notes after each back beat to replicate the echo on the snare drum, but only in the verses. The verses are where this echo felt the most prominent, and switching to a less busy version of the groove helped distinguish the pre-choruses and choruses from the verse. Finally, after watching a live clip of Washed Out playing the song in 2022 I decided to bring in the shaker for the pre-chorus and chorus. In studio you’d probably just overdub the shaker after recording the drums, but live you have to do both at once.
DRUMMING UPSTREAM LEADERBOARD
Since we already know where this song stands in my current estimation, I won’t belabor my explanation for its resting place at the bottom of the leaderboard. Instead I’d like to make it clear that I’ve got nothing against Greene as a person or a musician. He seems like a well adjusted and sincere artist, and he’s made some cool songs, this just doesn’t happen to be one of them. Washed Out won’t appear again in this series, but a lot of what their sound represents will show up in later entries. Washed Out’s moment in pop music happened just before cloud rap and and shoegaze stormed onto the scene, or back onto it in shoegaze’s case. The sound of softness was a huge through line for the 2010s, and it’s good that we have an example of its pitfalls so early in this series to refer to when future examples crop.
“Weightless” by Washed Out
For the next entry I’d like to work on a song that I really, really enjoy. I’ve got a few different options, some that build on the themes we looked at today and some that go in the complete opposite direction. In either case, thanks for reading and I’ll see you next week.
Years later, this same friend noted that we all ended up making beats in one way or another so the joke was really on us in the long run.
Married at the time at least, the lyrics on Purple Noon sound divorced as hell. I didn’t compare the album to Phil Collins just because it sounds like the 80s.