When “Lay Me Down” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Alternative Chart in 2010, it didn’t just bring Dirty Heads to mainstream audiences – it landed them in the record books.
The tune had humble beginnings. At the time, Dirty Heads had been focussed on other material for their debut album, 2008’s Any Port in a Storm. It was while enjoying a backyard barbecue with friend and fellow musician Rome Ramirez that “Lay Me Down” took shape.
“We were just hanging out, just relaxing. We had some acoustic guitars and we just started jamming, just for fun,” Dustin Bushnell, aka Duddy, explained to SongFacts.
“Rome had the ‘lay me down’ part, and then Duddy worked on some more words to it that night,” added the group’s co-lead vocalist, Jared Watson. “I had written something totally different to ‘Lay Me Down,’ a little bit more lovey, but then we realized three dudes singing more of a love song doesn’t work that well, and Duddy’s idea was better. He had the first verse and the lyrics to the chorus. It was a Bonnie and Clyde western-style story. Once I got that it was a lot easier for me to write the second verse – he wrote the first verse about them getting caught and getting chased, and I wrote the second verse and the bridge about how they found their little paradise. So it’s a story: the first verse they get caught, second verse, they’re still running and there’s bounties out for them, and then the bridge is they found their paradise in Mexico or wherever they were. Then we changed the lyrics on the out-chorus to, ‘we found our place to stay again.'”
‘Lay Me Down’ Was the Hit Song Nobody Saw Coming
Despite the ease with which “Lay Me Down” came about, nobody expected it to be the Dirty Heads’ breakout song. But slowly, the track began to catch on. Influential Los Angeles radio station KROQ put it in heavy rotation. Rolling Stone put it on their “Hot List” and MTV added the music video. Suddenly, the Dirty Heads had a hit.
“It was funny, because we spent a year in the studio recording this album with producers, and this big budget and every toy we wanted in the world to record this album. It was doing alright, but we didn’t have any radio love or anything,” Duddy recalled to Guitar World. “Then we played this song in my backyard with two acoustic guitars, and it became a Number 1 single. We were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ It was hilarious. When we found out that song was blowing up, it was definitely a good feeling and kind of funny at the same time.”
“Lay Me Down” hit No. 1 on the Alternative chart in May 2010. It would stay there for 10 weeks, a record for an independent release.
“Lay Me Down was our baby that we made,” Duddy explained to this writer in 2010. “We got to look at each other and just go, ‘What the fuck, dude?! We have a huge song!’ We’re on the top of the charts in front of bands like The Black Keys and Kings of Leon and Foo Fighters. They don’t even know who we are. Like, they’re looking at this chart going, ‘Who the fuck are The Dirty Heads and Rome?’ That was so insane to us.”
