Ba55

Album: Fading West (2014)
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Songfacts®:

  • Switchfoot are all keen surfers and derive their name from a surfing stance. Their vocalist Jon Foreman told us: "When I'm happy, when I'm enjoying life, I'm home, I'm surfing."
  • This song finds Foreman singing of riding some waves:

    "I watch the white lines fly
    Nothing between us here but the black blue sky
    Suspended up in the air, like a still life."

    Foreman said: "My wife says that surfing is like a form of baptism for me, that my time in the saltwater washes me clean. Often I come back from surfing ready for life in ways that I wasn't before: quicker to laugh, slower to get angry, more eager to help. The ocean puts me in my place- a finite creature humbled by the seemingly infinite expanse of ocean before me."

    He added: "The refining experiences of life are not only found in the water. At times it feels like a trial by fire- almost as though the impurities are melted away so that the soul can shine from beneath. The lyrical inspiration for 'Ba55' was that refining fire. The experience will leave you humbled, maybe even broken. But there everything is different on the other side- there's a new found purpose, a deeper understanding of life." (Source: Land Of Broken Hearts)

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