SPILL FEATURE: 7 SEAS: A RETURN TO WATER, AND THEMSELVES – A CONVERSATION WITH DIRTY HEADS

7 SEAS: A RETURN TO WATER, AND THEMSELVES

A CONVERSATION WITH DIRTY HEADS

Dirty Heads is a band that has always lived at the crossroads of breezy escapism and grounded emotional honesty.  But with their new release, 7 Seas, the emotional turnaround feels different, turning their crossroads into something mythic, fun, and deeply personal. 7 Seas turns struggle into a panoramic voyage, a sun-kissed concept that treats the ocean not as a backdrop, but a living character. Throughout the album’s runtime, 7 Seas becomes a meditation on freedom, nostalgia, and that strange back-and-forth feeling that emerges when one wants to drift away yet come home. The result of such a journey is the band’s most cohesive, organic, and filmic work in years, and it arrives at a point in their careers where they have earned their stripes and the confidence to know the kind of worlds they want to build, and have expanded that world, public expectations be damned. For vocalist Jared Watson, this newfound confidence has brought back the spark of youthful enthusiasm he felt 30 years ago, when the beginning of his career was exciting and full of raw, untouched creativity. This was not without its share of struggles, yet this journey gave him the tools to write and create what became 7 Seas.

“We were going through so many personal trials and tribulations on this album that, like, the suffering sucked, and we hated going through it. Personally, I didn’t want to go through it, obviously nobody does, but it really does give you a lot of material, at certain points I was just trying to stay above water, you know, pun intended. I was just trying not to flounder and not drown,” says Jared Watson. “A lot of this album is songs about reaching out to your friends and family that you know, and people that can support you. It’s about loving yourself and your future self and writing letters to your future self. What do you want to say to that person? You know, looking back when everything’s okay. The album’s super, super personal when it gets deeper, because you know life had just decided to throw a bunch of shit at us, or me, especially.”

While Dirty Heads have always been architects of atmosphere, the world in which 7 Seas lives goes beyond their unique blend of reggae, hip-hop, alternative rock, and coastal pop. When building the atmosphere for this album, it was never about musical gymnastics; it became about creating a mood for things the band had only begun to explore. 7 Seas has sharpened that instinct. 7 Seas would somewhat become that spiritual successor to Any Port in a Storm, where the metaphor for the ocean continued to expand, and from that, the maturity of a band that lived through the storms they once romanticized. The production feels warmer, the songwriting tighter, and the emotional stakes higher than ever before. Where earlier records chased endless sun-soaked rays and ocean waves for days, these endless summers would transform 7 Seas to want something deeper. What happens when the ocean you once used for escape becomes the place you use to finally understand yourself?

PURCHASE 7 SEAS VIA BANDCAMP

“It’s kind of life. Like the sea is life, right? The ocean is life, the sea is life. We live on a planet that is 71% water. Without water, there’s no life when it comes to our universe or our planet, and I think that’s why people are so drawn to water. I think that’s why people are happier when they’re around water, whether you live by a lake, a river, a beach, whatever. There’s something in us that makes water healing and comforting yet terrifying at the same time. So, for me, water is life, not only because I grew up surfing, and I grew up in the water, but I couldn’t live without it,” says Watson. “I’d go crazy, but when you zoom out onto a bigger scale, if you really look at so many analogies when it comes to life, like going with the flow, the tide being high or low, feeling like you’re drowning and the need to be saved, or braving a storm, there’s so many analogies that we use as humans when we use water and the ocean, it’s because it is so similar. You could be out on a boat, and it’s the most perfect day ever, and it’s just flat. There’s no wind, and it’s beautiful; there’s a little bit of wind, so you can sail, and next thing you know, there’s a squall, and you’re in a bunch of shit. It’s a very tumultuous, very stormy sea. Or, being a surfer, like waiting for swells, waiting for good waves, traveling to find good waves, there’s that search, and especially being a surfer, there is something super intimate about surfing and meditating while you’re out there. It’s not the one sport, but it’s one of the sports where you’re leaving it up to Mother Nature to practice, or get better, or enjoy yourself, you know. If there are no waves, you can’t. It’s not like when you’re skateboarding or practicing baseball; it’s the same thing every time. If there are no waves, you can’t practice. When you are surfing, you can kind of choose what you want to do, but you have to do what the wave allows, so you have to be more in the flow. If you’re really good, a lot of these pro guys can kind of do whatever they want, but you really have to surf the wave the way that the wave is giving itself to you, and the opportunities that come. So that’s life to me – you can live your life through the ocean.”

Such looseness, freedom, and searching would become the basis of 7 Seas. Not just the love or water and surfing, but how the vastness of the ocean meant there has always been the potential for something more. On 7 Seas, it becomes a metaphor for something more complex: the search for identity in a world that keeps shifting beneath the feet. While 7 Seas represents the trials and tribulations in the band members’ lives, the ocean has always been the main constant, providing a sanctuary from these struggles. While it’s sometimes bittersweet to relive youth and the joy of simpler days, 7 Seas doesn’t look back, pretending those days were perfect. The seven seas are not just bodies of water; they are emotional territories: love, loss, ambition, burnout, rebirth, memory, and hope, and the result of this has become the most surprisingly moving record they have created in two decades. However, there was a moment in this process that turned it from a fun record into something that would mean more.

“We had done “Sound Boy Killer,” “Badman,” “Stranded,” and maybe “7 Seas,” that might have come a little bit later, but we were kind of like in a lull during the making of this record; there were breaks. We had come back to the album, and I was driving to the studio, talking to my friend Mike, shout out to Mike, he runs a clothing company called Imperfects, it’s fantastic, everybody should go check it out. He’s such a creative guy; he writes poetry, and he’s just such an inspiration to me as a friend. Creatively, I was talking to him, and I was like, “Man, I don’t have anything to write about at the studio today.” So, we just started talking, and kind of moved on from that, and during the conversation, we were talking about how life was just kind of really gnarly at this point. He said that my mom would make him write letters to his future self, and right then and there, I was like, bro, like, that’s the song I’m writing today. We wrote that song in 30 minutes; it was just like verbal diarrhea. It just had to be; it was waiting. It was just very serendipitous and perfectly aligned. Once we got that song, I think that’s where it turned to where I was like, “Oh, this album probably isn’t just gonna be these fun, kind of surface hip hop songs that don’t mean a lot.” I had a lot more to say, and that was one realization where I was like, “Shit, I’m probably going to be getting a lot more personal on this album and writing a lot more material about what’s actually going on inside me.”

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Photo Credits: Travis Shinn