13 November 2021
Newsdesk
Beach House join Matt Wilkinson on Apple Music 1 today to discuss the release of the first of four chapters from their forthcoming album, "Once Twice Melody". They share what prompted them to create four distinct chapters of music and explain how they fit together to create a cohesive body of work, discuss the themes explored on Chapter One and more.
Beach House Tell Apple Music About “Once Twice Melody”…
Victoria Legrand: Well, it's the culmination of three years of a lot of work. We're very excited. It's this big, wonderful, crazy world that we have just put up, it's the beginning.
Alex Scally: We tend to not preconceive things too much. And as we were working on this record and this body of work, it took on a very strange but exciting form, which was this kind of long form expansive release. Then as we started to understand what it meant and what the songs meant, we realised that the chapters were forming on their own. And that was really, really exciting. It was kind of little vignettes or mini stories or episodes.
Beach House Tell Apple Music How The Four Chapters Of “Once Twice Melody” Fit Together…
Victoria Legrand: They 100% fit as one overarching, 1-18 story. And so that was part of the discovery of realising that it could be broken into four chapters, but also work as one. We utilised a lot more of our imaginations, and our editing, and just thinking about it. It didn't just feel like a regular, like another album of ours, it felt like a larger, newer kind of way of looking at our music, cinematic, literary.
Alex Scally: We were really inspired by the kind of length and depth of those forms. There's so many confines in music that really dominate everyone's minds, whether we realise it or not, like the four-minute song, and the 10 song album, and all of those kind of things. And I think subconsciously we've always subscribed to, "An album has a sound." So it kind of sticks in your mind that a record should be uniform to some degree. And I think in the past we'd always really been controlled by that. We'd have some extra songs laying around and we'd go, "Oh, it doesn't really fit. It feels out of flow with the rest of the record." I think what was happening to us along the way is we started to have all these really, really strong ideas, but they felt completely in conflict with some of the other ideas we had. And as we indulged it, we started to realise that it developed this like really, really engaging push-pull feeling as you kind of meandered through an expansive song. And actually we wrote far more songs than are on this very long record.
Beach House Tells Apple Music About Project’s Title Track ‘Once Twice Melody’…
Victoria Legrand: There's a fair amount of abstraction in all art, but each chapter has its own world. And then inside of those worlds, like for example, ‘Once Twice Melody’, the title track, is very much like well... We've always perceived the first track of the album as the introduction or the gateway, hopefully a beautiful entrance into what is essentially an ode to creativity, imagination, and creation. Largely this whole record 1 - 18, there is a lot of love inside of it, there's a sacredness of nature. There are so many little pockets of themes and love inside of it.
Beach House Tell Apple Music About The Themes Explored On Chapter One…
Victoria Legrand: I guess, to be more specific it's like if every chapter is broken up, then within each one each particular song could really be talked about. So you could say, "What is ‘Superstar’?" Well, ‘Superstar’ is a cosmic love song.
Alex Scally: This [Chapter One] is by far the most metaphysical chapter. It's the loftiest…it has that kind of courting you manner.
Victoria Legrand: There's a fantastical thing in it too, yeah.
Beach House Tell Apple Music About New Song ‘Pink Funeral’…
Victoria Legrand: Well that song from the very beginning of its creation was immediately extremely theatrical to us, and it was very dramatic. It was drama. And I think when that song was created, we knew that this record was going to have far-reaching elements of that, that the dramatic was going to be in there. So yeah, that song was kind of like our rock, not rock opera, but it felt like very grand, like you said, majestic. And then it grew and it grew and it grew, and then the tail end of that song with the solo is just trying to take it to an even larger place. But it is essentially at its core about a type of heartbreak, but it's also about creation and how we lose ourselves in fantasy, like when we go to the ballet and we see intense dramas performed before us, but then somehow relate to it on a very private, intimate level, maybe behind a mask, and a tear falling down your face. So it's this kind of playing with scale, something very personal and private, but on a large scale. So I think that is for me, a lot of what ‘Pink Funeral’ feels like.
Alex Scally: I think that we are deeply inspired by the kind of overblown, super dramatic style that music can have that I feel was really popular in the eighties, maybe with like hair metal, or like Prince had it a lot. It almost felt gaudy, but it was so intense and powerful. And I think that we were just kind of, not musically, but just energetically really kind of channelling some of that world.
Beach House Tell Apple Music How Their Sound And Image Has Evolved…
Victoria Legrand: What we do as a band and where we've evolved, even with tour, theatrical elements have grown over the years because our imaginations have grown. What we desire as artists is much larger or more theatrical than just sitting in a chair with an acoustic guitar, which is a beautiful thing. But for whatever reason, our art has taken us to somehow a larger place. Melodrama.
