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Released on September 12, 2025
Written, Composed, Performed by Lucia Zambetti
Composed, Produced, Mixed by Hudson Pollock
Mastered by Omar Akrouche
© 2025 R&R
Photos by Ceren Aygün
Styled by Shahmaran Vintage
Makeup & Hair by Ali Scharf
Playlist of songs to go with Wash you Clean:
"Heaven Can Wait" – Judie Tzuke
"The Duke Is Gone" – Chuck Senrick
"Strange Condition" – Pete Yorn
"Sand River" – Beth Gibbons, Rustin Man
"Lie To Me" – Chris Isaak
"O Virtus Sapientiae" – Hildegard von Bingen, Kirsteen Rogers
"Androgynous" – The Replacements
"First In Spring" – Maxine Funke
"Give Up Your Guns" – The Buoys
"Houdini" – Kate Bush
"Books Written For Girls" – Camera Obscura
"Homesick" – Kings of Convenience
"Los Angeles" – Big Thief
"Chimacum Rain" – Linda Perhacs
"Losing True" – The Roches
"Guitars" – Rupert Holmes
"Love Song To A Stranger" – Joan Baez
"I Figured You Out" – Mary Lou Lord
"I Talk To The Wind" – King Crimson
"Are You There God? It’s Me, @" – @
"Turnstyle" – Chris Weisman
"Our Tune" – Dolly Mixture
"Let It Go" – Peter Broderick
"The Light Before We Land" – The Delgados
I wrote this song one evening after hanging out with my friends. I rushed to get home. This was one of the few songs that I have written in a state of urgency. I remember I was sitting with my friends and started hearing the chord progression. Typically, I sit down with my guitar when I’m feeling inspired and try to work something out. I have no technical training in guitar. This was different—I knew the melody before I knew how to put it together with words.
I knew what I wanted to sing about—I’m an anxious person, and so are a lot of my friends. In a personal time of searching for a heightened sense of self-reflection, my trials and tribulations with therapy and my relationship with spirituality and religion, I’ve been thinking about the ways in which we are broken and the ways in which we aim to fix them. This is true for me, this is true for my friends and friends who are no longer, and this may be true for you. As reflective humans with relationships, experience, and orientational goals (orienting ourselves within these frames), we fall on our sword, and fixing this brokenness becomes our purpose. We hurt ourselves and bash ourselves for being the problem. We tend to patterned behavior and patterned events, in search of the common denominator—landing on ourselves. I don’t wish to make a claim on whether this is a good or bad practice—I am in no space to advise, as I struggle with this myself.
I was thinking about the ways in which we turn to therapy in a spiritual sense, and the ways we turn to spirituality as therapy. Like a doctrine, self-help books become bibles. Licensed therapists become preachers, validating the side of the story they hear from us.
I built the lyrics around the concept of The Machine. A metaphor for the industrial therapeutic prowess—feelings become a problem, like a rash or a cough. Problems with solutions: cough medicine, penicillin. A prescription. Do we become desensitized to our feelings through our capitalization-enforced burden on the self? Is it us who has to heal?
These are all questions. To be human is to be skeptical.
I picture The Machine as a final source—the most expensive solution to our innate humanistic problems. I must make it clear that the qualm is not directly with the practice of therapy or psychology. It’s the uncomfortability to experience the world. It’s the dread. It’s the boundaries we create for ourselves—most of the time important. But when does that go too far? When have we traded making sense of the world for a way to shut it out?
Lastly, I’ve written about the significance of washing another person on my Substack page (ineedacigarettesobad). The art of washing another person/bathing someone is deeply embedded in my understandings of culture, relationship, respect, and orientation. To keep it brief, I believe washing someone’s back with a sponge and soap or a glove is the highest order of respect and lineage. But what I have not mentioned in that piece is bathing someone in a helpless state. I have been there. I can remember a specific time when my body was filled with such dread, sadness, and a dissociative reaction. In that moment, I was sitting in my bathtub and a dear friend of mine had taken a cloth to my back. I barely noticed she was there. She knew that. I stared at the wall, the tiles.
To wash someone’s back is to see them as helpless. It’s a sign of pity, but a sign of togetherness and intimacy. It’s an act of closeness and an act of comfort. This world is a scary place. We must be there for each other.
Lyrics:
Wash you clean
Holding on to New York summer
Your knees have both turned green
Rolling round in grass and broken bottles
As you scream, blood is dripping down and making its own little stream
Scared of what you’ve seen
Broken all your seams
I’ve got a friend with pins and needles
Does it fast and clean
You wont feel feel a single thing
Your eyes they really gleam
Only for fluorescent lights, you’re starting to get mean
Cause they brought the machine
Wash you clean
Holding on to New York summer
Your knees have both turned green
Scared of what you’ve seen