The Meaning Behind Beach House's "Space Song" – American Songwriter
by June 9, 2024
The whole point of Beach House is transportation. Dream-pop is the vehicle Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally use to pull listeners from their current reality and into the next space. Since debuting in 2006 with Beach House, the Baltimore duo have used vintage drum machines, organs, and synthesizers to thread together indie-pop and shoegaze to a destination that’s more experience than place.
Beach House began with a lo-fi indie album recorded on a 4-track. The album is psychedelia and shoegaze with touches of classical themes and vocals echoing Kate Bush. It established Beach House as critics’ darlings and makers of wistful, sometimes dissonant, summery, gauzy pop.
Their music has hints of Spiritualized, Slowdive, and Yo La Tengo. And they’ve evolved with each release without jarring reinventions. But what began as lo-fi bedroom pop soon aspired for the sky, and now Beach House has produced a catalog of consistently great records.
Like any good Romantic, Legrand focuses her lens on sorrow. On her space travels through albums like Devotion, Teen Dream, and Bloom, she offers hope in the sadness. Sometimes sadness creeps in before the trip ends, knowing the experience is ephemeral.
Beach House is like a silent movie where laughter looks like crying—the tiny moment when sadness and happiness collide. The blipping synths reveal the creases around the mouth from a lifetime of laughter while fading sounds remind listeners the hourglass will someday be empty.
“Space Song” would make Spiritualized’s J. Spaceman proud. While he was happy to float in space, Beach House gazes both at its shoes and at the stars. Their band name reflects a structure that’s stuck in time. An actual beach house is the place you visit on vacation. It’s a destination and an escape from life’s malaise. Legrand and Scally may not have thought too deeply about naming their band, but the one they chose couldn’t be more perfect for the kind of escapist and joyous melancholy they compose.
Beach House’s fifth album, Depression Cherry, continued the band’s slow evolution of using music to escape. Sub Pop released “Space Song” as a promotional single, which promptly went TikTok-viral in 2021, appearing in more than 200,000 videos. Having a “sleeper hit” for Beach House is fitting for a band writing the soundtrack to trances.
“Space Song” opens with the narrator overcome by a failed relationship and the loneliness of night. The wound is fresh as she wonders through soliloquy if she’ll ever find love again.
Tender is the night
For a broken heart
Who will dry your eyes
When it falls apart?
She’s naïve for having believed he loved her. Then she urges herself to return to the old life, back to “me” and “I,” not “us” or “we.” Legrand sings through her phrases with almost dry sarcasm, using contempt to raise herself from bed.
You wide-eyed girls
You get it right
Fall back into place
Fall back into place
Legrand’s main musical move is the weight of her hand on an organ note. She uses droning tones to ground the space flight to something familiar. The drone is punctuated by stabbing synths and Scally’s distant slide guitar. The tension between human musicians and programmed machines is the group’s DNA. A drum machine won’t budge from its tempo, but imperfection is what it means to be human. It’s a fragile musical bond with the potential to fall apart—like any relationship.
What makes this fragile world go round?
Were you ever lost?
Was she ever found?
As she repeats the line “fall back into place,” a bubbling arpeggiated synth lifts the song somewhere closer to hope. It rescues her from the depression of starting over again. Instead, what’s familiar—what’s more assured than an unreliable lover—is her survival instinct. Everything’s going to be OK. Legrand layers her voice into a digital choir, acting like a support system for the brokenhearted. Her droning, dusty organ gives the cold synthesizers a balancing warmth. The drum machine beats on in perfect rhythm, like how the pulse of life predictably goes on.
[RELATED: Behind the Song Lyrics: “Zebra” by Beach House]
Beach House had used live drums on tour to support their previous album, Bloom (2012). Legrand and Scally both felt stifled by the live drum kit. After a creative drought, they returned to their old methods of using drum machines and building songs from simple arrangements. Like Legrand’s character in “Space Song,” they returned to an old version of themselves.
With the success of Teen Dream and Bloom, the duo expanded their sound as they began playing larger venues with bigger stages. The louder and developing sound was at odds with the quiet minimalism of Beach House’s natural state. On “Space Song,” they ignored the band’s growing popularity and instead focused on ethereal melodies and minimal instrumentation. Beach House returned from vacation.
Photo by Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images
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