When David Foral showed up to Duddy B’s backyard with a laptop, a mic, and no real plan, he didn’t know he was about to help birth one of the defining alt-reggae anthems of the 2010s. The bassist had just joined Dirty Heads a few months earlier, and the band was scrambling to get something new written before heading out on the Warped Tour.
“We had a recording session coming up at Hurley Studios in a couple of days, and we needed to write something,” Foral recalls. “I remember taking those backyard jam recordings home that night, adding some beats, and sending them out so everyone could write to it.”
The song that emerged—”Lay Me Down,” featuring Rome Ramirez—would go on to spend eleven weeks at number one on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart, catapulting Dirty Heads into a new stratosphere. But at the time, it didn’t feel like a hit. It just felt necessary.
“We didn’t know what to expect with that song,” Foral says. “It was a good song, but we didn’t think it would get as big as it did.”
The timing, of course, was serendipitous. “Lay Me Down” became the world’s first real taste of what that Rome Ramirez voice could do, before fans got to know him as the frontman Sublime With Rome. It didn’t hurt that the track radiated West Coast cool, with dusty guitar strums and breezy melodies tailor-made for long drives down PCH.
“We were lucky to be in the right place at the right time,” Foral admits. “There was a lot of attention focused on Sublime With Rome and their new singer. Radio got excited. But at the end of the day, it still had to be a good song.”
It was more than good—it was sticky, undeniable, and sun-soaked in a way that made you feel like it had always existed. The band didn’t fully grasp what they had until they moved from van-and-trailer life to riding in their first tour bus.
“That was one of those big benchmarks,” Foral says. “We were like, ‘Oh man, we’re making it.’ People always think this stuff happens overnight—it doesn’t. But that song? That was a moment.”
And in a genre often relegated to the margins of the mainstream, “Lay Me Down” became a rare breakthrough. It wasn’t just a song—it was a signal flare. Dirty Heads had arrived.
