Washed Out‘s fifth and most audacious album to date is “Notes From A Quiet Life.” The music of Washed Out has always levitated over a timeless frontier. You can sense it in his immersive, amorphous vocals, expansive soundscapes, and wistful storytelling. In 2021, Washed Out’s creative force, Ernest Greene, left Atlanta to return to the countryside he knew growing up. Where escapism once flooded his thoughts, today, he is preoccupied with the universe of wonder in the reality around him.
He named the former horse farm he moved to “Endymion” (after the pastoral John Keats poem about a lovesick shepherd — its opening line: “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever”). It has shaped all that he’s created there, from his music to his albums’ creative direction to his planned large-scale visual-art experiments. That purity of vision is what makes “Notes From a Quiet Life” so potent. It’s the first album Greene wholly self-produced, with mixing assistance from Nathan Boddy (James Blake, Mura Masa) and David Wrench (Caribou, Florence + the Machine).
Unabashed and unafraid to pioneer and incorporate new technologies within his art, Greene enlisted multi-disciplinary Artist, Writer, and Director Paul Trillo to direct the music video for the album’s lead single, “The Hardest Part.” Created using OpenAI’s Sora, “The Hardest Part” marks the first collaboration with an artist and filmmaker to be generated entirely utilizing this technology.