Inspired by memorable lines
Beach House's novel approach to songwriting
June 8, 2007 --Victoria Legrand and Alex Scally call their band Beach House, but their music is not summer soundtrack material. In fact, there's nothing beachy about it. Their self-titled debut album (released in October 2006) is dreamy and vertiginous, layered with reverbed organ and wistful vocals -- everything any decent summer anthem is not. Yet when the Baltimore-based duo tried to put a name to their music, Beach House was the most apt moniker they could come up with.
"We were trying to describe the sounds we were hearing in the little world where we exist," says Legrand on the phone, while driving Scally and herself from Bismarck, N.D., to Minneapolis as part of Beach House's national tour (with a stop at the Museum of Fine Arts tomorrow night). "It always sounded strange, haunted, and potentially weird -- like a house somewhere else.''
"Strange" and "haunted" are fitting descriptions of their music, which has earned a mention in Rolling Stone, praise from tastemaking indie music website Pitchfork, and an opening spot on tour with British psych-rock band the Clientele.
Beach House's music conjures images of a weathered seaside dwelling in late autumn, long after the last visitors have packed their damp towels and cleaned the sand from their rubber soles. Legrand and Scally weave together muted guitar, mournful organ,punctuated by echoing distortion and topped by Legrand's faraway vocals, which often draw comparisons to those of Mazzy Star frontwoman Hope Sandoval. Vague lyrics like "You only give me what you don't want no more/ Ask the questions that you don't know at all," from the song "Apple Orchard," leave room for interpretation -- and that's Scally and Legrand's point.
"People tend to like that song because it's very open, it transports people," says Legrand. "That's how it felt to me." In some cases, Legrand says, the music itself inspires her ambiguous lyrics ("I tend to be abstract. I don't like images that are too literal"), but on occasion the lyrics, and entire songs, stem from one sentence. Much as one musician might craft a song based on a melody incessantly running through his head, Legrand will write a song based around a phrase she can't seem to shake. "There are things that people say that you never forget," she says. The album's first track, "Saltwater," for example, centers on the repeated phrase "You couldn't lose me if you tried." Legrand says a "special someone" said this to her, and when it came time to write a song, "those words came out instantly. It's very intimate, and I knew it would mean something to lots of other people. We all want to feel that from somebody."
If Beach House's music is mysterious, it's also intimate. There's a palpable element of seductiveness -- an aspect that led one recent reviewer to declare, "It's music for stripping." But Beach House isn't offering any songs up as the soundtrack for racy scenes on cable TV. "I don't think we've ever felt sexy making this music," Legrand says with a laugh. "Although on some level all music has deep sensuality.''
All this sensuality and intimacy leads to the inevitable assumptions about boy-girl duos -- that Scally and Legrand are a couple -- but they are strictly platonic musical collaborators. Legrand, daughter of Grammy-winning French composer Michel Legrand, has a varied musical background that includes everything from classical piano training to fronting an otherwise all-male Led Zeppelin cover band. She met Scally through a mutual friend when she moved to Baltimore in 2003, and the two began writing and performing locally soon after.
Legrand cites everything from classical music to Michael Jackson to 1960s-era French pop as influences, but every now and then she turns to "terrible music" for a fresh breath in her life. "Stuff like Ace of Base and LFO," a.k.a. Lyte Funky Ones, best known for the 1999 chart topper "Summertime Girls" she says. "That stuff keeps you alive, and keeps things from feeling so serious." Perhaps there's something beachy about Beach House after all. 