AWOLNATION released “Sail” as a single on November 8, 2010, through Red Bull Records. Aaron Bruno’s song had already appeared on the 2010 EP Back from Earth and would reach a wider audience on the band’s 2011 debut album, Megalithic Symphony. Its beginnings were modest: Bruno and engineer Kenny Carkeet made it during a session when they had been meant to work on something else.
Bruno was trying to work out whether he had a future as a recording artist. In a 2011 interview with Interview, he described financial trouble after his previous band ended and the possibility of writing pop songs for other performers. Writing for someone else to sing never felt right to him. “Sail” gave him a way to put his own circumstances into a song, which he described as “almost like a journal entry about how I was feeling at the time.” He hadn’t settled on the project’s name or decided how serious it would become.
The session itself left room for experimentation. Carkeet told zZounds in 2016 that he was engineering with Bruno when they abandoned their planned task and began a new song from scratch. He remembered roughly five hours in the studio, without a deliberate effort to reproduce whatever was doing well on the charts. Carkeet also identified the source of the recording’s bass sound: an ATC-1 Tone Chameleon, a monophonic rack-mounted synthesizer. For live shows, he later sampled the recorded bass notes into his Nord Wave keyboard, carrying that studio sound onto the stage.
Red Bull Records offered a way to develop those ideas into a full record. Bruno told V13 in 2011 that other interested labels had reminded him of major-label experiences he’d already been through. Red Bull offered studio time and the freedom to make the album he wanted. After earlier projects had left him dealing with label departures and unfinished plans, simply having a complete album released and available for people to hear mattered to him. He said he hadn’t expected “Sail” to become the song driving the project’s radio success.
Listeners began finding it before the album arrived. Billboard’s 2013 account traced an early breakthrough to Austin station KROX, which played “Sail” in July 2010. Within a week, listener requests had made it the station’s most-requested new song. Airplay followed in Portland and Indianapolis. Online videos gave the recording another route to listeners, including wingsuit footage, while television and advertising placements kept exposing it to new audiences.
That gradual growth showed up on the charts. “Sail” reached No. 5 on Billboard’s Alternative Songs chart in 2011, but its crossover run continued well beyond that initial rock-radio reception. It eventually reached No. 17 on the Hot 100 and spent 79 weeks on the chart. The song’s commercial life extended far past the release cycle that introduced it.
On June 14, 2021, “Sail” earned RIAA Diamond certification. A recording Bruno had made while questioning his direction had reached the certification level for 10 million U.S. units.
