

At one point, he’s too lazy to masturbate. When his dog runs away, he just waits around until the pound calls. A lot of the album is about drifting through life with as little effort as possible it’s slacker rock all the way. From a distance, it’s harder to hear the hurt.Īpathy is a persistent theme.
#Sublime wrong way lyrics full#
In order to get the full emotional spectrum, you have to dig a little deeper, which is perhaps why it gets so many plays as bong-rip background music. This, in spite of the lunk-headed nature of most of the album, makes Sublime a more layered and mentally engaging album than many of its alt-rock peers. The music here is always sunny, even when the content isn’t: there are no musical cues that tell you to feel bad, like strummed guitars or maudlin pianos. One of Sublime’s strengths is it doesn’t hit you in the face with its pathos in the way Sublime’s fellow SoCal junkies The Red Hot Chili Peppers are wont to do with their ballads. Is he content or just numb? Is that why the music here is so consistently happy despite all the horrible shit he sings about? His frank admission that he’s trying to seem happy when he’s not casts a dark shadow on the next song, “What I Got,” where he declares he doesn’t get sad when Louie runs away.

He wants to seem happy but there’s a big, black hole in his soul. “Garden Grove” is his introduction: we learn that he’s from L.A., he’s got a badly behaved dog named Louie and he’s addicted to heroin. Wilson’s an itchy-fingered bassist and Gaugh slams the drums competently, but at the end of the day, Sublime is a character piece centered around Nowell. “Garden Grove” is truly one of the great album openers of all time, setting the stage for a world Nowell, Bud Gaugh and Eric Wilson would spend the better part of the next hour completely inhabiting. The original sequencing was finally made available on the album’s 10th anniversary deluxe reissue back in 2006, and listening to that version, it’s astounding that anything but “Garden Grove” could be the first track. Initially, leader Bradley Nowell wanted the album to start out with a short cover of Bob Marley’s “Trenchtown Rock” before segueing into “Doin’ Time,” which is now the album’s closer. The line, “big salty tears rolling down to her chin” is a reference to a song called “Big Salty Tears” by The Ziggens, a band that was signed to Sublime’s Skunk Records.What you get on Sublime is not the band’s original vision. “Wrong Way” is featured in the video game Aggressive Inline. Directed by Gregory Dark and Josh Fischel, Bijou Phillips stars as the girl in the song, Annie. The surviving members of the band made a video for this song after Nowell’s death. Since MCA preferred $16 albums over $2 singles, “Wrong Way” and the other songs on the album were not made available for sale in America, which made them ineligible for the Hot 100 chart according to Billboard rules. “Wrong Way” was the third single promoted to radio (following “Santeria”), and it peaked on the Billboard Airplay chart in August 1997, about a year after Nowell’s death. Slowly, listeners were turned on to Sublime, and the album eventually sold over 5 million copies.

“What I Got” was sent to American radio stations, and did surprisingly well considering there was no band to promote it. Sublime released two albums on their own label before getting a deal with MCA, but lead singer Brad Nowell died of a drug overdose two months before their major-label debut was issued. In our interview with Sublime bass player Eric Wilson, he said, “‘Wrong Way’ is about a girl that we knew in Long Beach. The narrator of the song, sexually attracted to Annie, removes her from the situation, but she ultimately leaves him as well. This song refers to Annie, a 12-year-old girl soon to be forced into a life of prostitution by her “drunk-ass” dad. Her two brown eyes are leaking like a sieve She took a hike it don’t matter if I like it or not He needed money so he put her on the streetĮverything was going fine until the day she met meĪnd I’m sorry when I say, that straight to this very day Is her seven horny brothers and a drunk-ass dad (Big) salty tears running down to her chin Annie’s 12 years old, in two more she’ll be a whoreĭon’t be afraid with the quickness you’ll get laid
