Song Review: “Washed Away” by Dead Billionaires
It might feel like we’re submerged in a constant tide of bad news, but small victories are breaking through all around us. Union support and membership have climbed to a sixty-year high, community-driven organizing is beginning to show real results, and mutual aid networks are operating at their strongest, stepping in to support people through every kind of crisis, even as the current administration continues to create new ones by the day. Is it enough to pull us out? Not quite. Enough to glimpse something brighter ahead? Not really. What about quieting the Ronin Renner sense of dread? Well… maybe a little, if only because it’s opened the door for Dead Billionaires to make hope feel worth investing in again on “Washed Away.”
“If I feel just a little bit hopeful,” the song begins with one of the most infectious lines of recent memory. It’s the summation of a decade spent under the thumb of oligarchs, trying to build traction and gain momentum under tightening pressure, pushing back just enough to let something lighter slip through. Like hope. The kind that leads to action, or the kind that leads to getting through another day with a little more light than before.
It’s not just the words. It’s the way frontman Warren Campbell delivers them. There’s a fullness to it, a sense of lift. Not defiant, and not forceful. Just genuinely alive, like something stirring awake and remembering what it’s supposed to feel like. It’s enough to pull us out of the fog and nudge us toward the kind of joy we were always meant to have.
The ska backbone only amplifies that sensation. Nick Trbovich‘s roaming bass line and a bright horn arrangement from Nathan Koch, with Vicki Q Agrawal on trombone and Matty Kirkland on tenor sax, add to the energy, but the real jolt is in the movement, the natural bob of your head locking into Campbell’s clipped upstrokes and Kevin Vorhis‘s tapping beat. It’s a rhythm that feels restorative, a welcome shift from the constant, weary head-shaking of recent years. It’s buoyant. Breezy. Revitalizing. Music that redirects your focus away from arguing over the left, center, and right, and instead has you pondering if you should slot this in as 2 Tone, third-wave, or New Tone ska.
Of course, this isn’t just a matter of dressing up a bleak reality with a bright smile. The lyrics dig into lingering trauma and survivor’s guilt; making it through COVID in one piece or just existing in a fragile kind of peace while others pay the price daily (“Not everybody made it out alive\ And us remaining a little worse for wear“). It falls in line with the path set by ska greats like Prince Buster and Junior Murvin, where a light, carefree sound carries something heavier beneath it. The rhythm may spark movement and deliver an infectious melody, but it also carries a message that can’t be shaken off any time soon.
That message for “Washed Away” is found in the community around us, a recognition that survival and healing are shared efforts, not solo endeavors (“But we’re all we got and we’re all that we need“). While Campbell often begins from a personal vantage point, even in the line that gives the song its name (“I’ve been shaken and washed away“), he continually widens that lens, shifting into a collective voice. It’s a deliberate move from “I” to “we,” reinforcing the strength found in togetherness and underscoring the growing power of unity over opposition: “But we can provide what they never will.” Us versus them, right?
It wouldn’t be a Dead Billionaires track without that signature political bite cutting through the wit (“Cause state violence is the biggest cash cow“) or the broader, rallying cries for collective uprising (“And your anxieties\ Ain’t gonna help the revolution\ Cause we’ve got all our bared teeth\ Pointed towards the future“). But even in those moments, the focus stays rooted in the collective, those left rattled, uncertain, and reaching for something steady. It’s a space the firebrand trio has long inhabited with ease, on songs like “Checks” and “Hopes & Dreams,” folding their sharper critiques into something unmistakably human, grounded in shared experience and the deliberate act of holding onto one another.
Like life itself, the song offers no clean resolution to its central conflict, but it finds meaning in the people beside you. “Cause there ain’t much more than me and you,” Campbell sings, grounding everything in connection. It’s those bonds that have built the world as we know it, and the same ones that can push it toward something better, less beholden to stock prices and digital abstraction, and more attuned to the people within it. That’s where the real shift begins: letting the emptier priorities be the ones that get washed away, leaving behind the sense of unity and uplift Dead Billionaires channel so effortlessly on this rousing ska track.
“Washed Away” is now streaming on all platforms. Keep up with Dead Billionaires on social media for updates on upcoming shows and future releases.
