If you’ve ever spent more than five minutes flipping your way around TikTok in the last few years, it’s highly likely you’re familiar with the haunting Space Song by Beach House.
Released over ten years ago as part of the Baltimore dream pop-duo’s fifth album, Depression Cherry, this highly emotive piece of music has become modern cultural currency. Typically used as the audio accompaniment to a range of memes and videos that mirror the song’s underlying pain.
Further exposure to Space Song came with placement in the Netflix television series Wednesday. With it, those youngsters who missed out on the song’s initial moment in the sun were suddenly drawn towards a new favourite band, The vividly ethereal Beach House, who had an impressive canon of work just waiting for this newfound audience to wallow within.
As of time of writing, Space Song remains by far their biggest song, and has racked up over 1.5 million streams on Spotify alone.
“It’s like this comet that’s doing its own thing, that’s super fun and ridiculous,” said Beach House’s central creative, Victoria Legrand in an interview with Pitchfork.“It’s also beyond our ability to control or understand, and that is relaxing to me. I am definitely a child of chaos, and something that calms me is understanding that there’s beauty in chaos, but you have to let go.”
Now ubiquitous, when Space Song was actually written, Beach House were struggling to overcome a creative impasse.
At the end of the tour following their fourth album Bloom, the pair – vocalist/keyboardist Victoria Legrand and guitarist, keyboardist and backing vocalist Alex Scally – took a six-month break and pondered whether they should call time on their critically-acclaimed project.
“We didn’t know if it [the making of album #5] was going to happen,” Legrand told Paste. “We didn’t expect that it was going to happen. I didn’t feel creative at all for about five or six months after coming back from tour with the Bloom cycle. I just thought well, maybe I’ll never have another musical idea. I really didn’t push it at all.”
Thankfully, after some much needed R&R, and many serious discussions around the shape of their future, the two reconvened and began to work on a new album – albeit with caveats.
Firstly, the pair agreed that this tranche of new Beach House songs should hark back to the more grounded, lo-fi aesthetic of their first two LPs.
They’d majorly dial-down the use of live drum kits (which were becoming more frequent, particularly during the live touring) and once again, rely largely on their collection of retro drum machines, namely a Casio SK-8 and a classic LinnDrum.
“I think spending hours writing together, without worrying about the presence of drums and their noise, led us to try to get the most out of things with as few instruments as possible,” Legrand reflected in an interview with MowNo. “That’s how we started this band. This process is, in a way, a way of going back to our roots.”
Beach House’s sound was defined by a feeling of ghostly nostalgia, which was suitably conjured by some fairly basic keyboards and synths, most of which had been hoovered up from thrift stores.
“Every keyboard has one thing on it that is really amazing and completely unique,” Scally told The Nashville Scene. “Even if about 95 percent of the sounds and presets are completely unusable or uncreative, there’s at least one amazing thing.”
A major part of Victoria’s keyboard set-up at that time, was the Yamaha PS-20. As documented by this extraordinarily well-researched article over at Reverb Machine, the PS-20’s ten sounds could be sustained to give each note release a long release time, which added pensive flavour to Legrand’s arpeggios and her epic-sized organ and string patches.
With their classic gear dusted down and fired-up, Alex and Victoria reconvened with their regular producer Chris Coady at Louisiana’s Studio in the Country, to capture an all new batch of songs. Little did the pair know that these were the songs that would ultimately form Beach House’s most quintessential record.
Within this number came the tender, lullaby-like Sparks, the hazy undulation of PPP’s laddering arpeggios and the warm embrace of what would be the album’s closer Days of Candy. Also manifested at this time would come the song that would accelerate far beyond the orbit of the band’s cult audience.
Space Song was shaped by its minor chord-heavy progression, performed on a cinematic-sounding string and organ, and its soaring slide guitar motif. Peppering the mix was a simplistic, almost arcade game-like 8-bit arpeggio and a robotic drum machine. All of this was suitably drenched in reverb.
Played by Alex on his Fender Stratocaster (and enmeshed with the organ sound), the central slide guitar line was likely ran through an octave pedal whilst reverb came courtesy of a modest Boss digital reverb/delay. This imbued Scally’s exemplary slide playing with a distinctly ‘living’ quality that counterbalanced the mechanical pulse of the arpeggio and drum machine.
The vast droning layers of organ and string machine were wrought from Legrand’s PS-20, forming a luscious bedrock in both high and low registers.
Throughout most of the song’s verses, the chord progression passed slowly through a cyclical Eb-Cm-Fm-Bb6, while the chorus became more hymn-like, switching up to Eb-Gm before circling back to a two-chord per-measure descent of Cm-Gm-Fm-Ab. This part punctuated the lyric ‘fall back into place’ which, satisfyingly, was explaining what was happening musically – as the chords step-by-step paced their way back to the verse.
Legrand’s lyrics were oblique, and seemed to allude to a break-up or the loss of someone central (implying that the ‘Space’ of the title was less of the stars variety, and more of the personal kind).
Victoria herself has rarely commented on these impressionistic lyrics. “I have never tried to understand Space Song and I don’t want to,” reflected Legrand in her interview with Pitchfork. “You respect it and you leave it alone.”
Tender is the night
For a broken heart
Who will dry your eyes
When it falls apart?
Released as Depression Cherry’s only promotional single, the gorgeously poignant Space Song was immediately popular with both Beach House devotees and casual listeners, gaining a significant amount of radio coverage and regular playlist placement.
However, the song’s true moment in the sun would come around five years later, circa 2021, when it was adjoined to a video clip of actor Pedro Pascal. Initially laughing hysterically, Pascal’s laughter suddenly falls away into some over-the-top crying (actually the clip was trimmed from a Zoom-based bit of script-reading alongside actor Paul Giamatti).
The highly editable meme – with the Pascal clip positioned as if he was reacting to an (interchangeable) unrelated event, had garnered 200,000 views on TikTok by September 2022, and streams for the song began to steadily increase across all platforms.
It was perhaps because of this newfound recognition that Netflix’s teen-angled series Wednesday opted to use the song in the third episode of its first season in December 2022, further boosting streams by a whopping 41%.
Over subsequent years, the popularity of that meme has only grown. As indicated at the start of this piece, the result of this exposure means that Space Song’s impressive second life has seen it transcend the Beach House catalogue to become an instantly recognisable, pop cultural totem.
Frequently used to denote sadness bubbling up just below the surface of a smile (or, depending on which meme you watch, a sudden mood swing), Space Song’s strength as an emotion-seizing piece of art is still hitting the spot over a decade on.
“This song sounds like a group of friends going their separate ways forever,” commented user adambruh3117 on the song’s official YouTube comments, while another (burakb4797) perhaps most appositely summed up the song’s enduring, heart-pulling power; “This song feels like a ‘see you soon’ but the soon is not actually soon.”
“I think if you believe in what you do, your world will resonate with people,” Legrand said in her interview with MowNow back in 2015. She presciently added, “it might take time, but that’s okay.”
