Summit Hills (Beach House - Irene)

Beach House - Irene

They say that the more you repeat something, the more likely you are to believe it. The point of the repetition, in this case, isn't necessarily to make that thing true, or to speak it into existence, but rather to make that thing acceptable and familiar, to make it real. Repetition is maybe the most immediately present character on "Irene", the closing track on Beach House's near-perfect Bloom, but it's the paradoxically unsteady assuredness that sticks out the most to me.

I don't know exactly what "Irene" is about, or who she is, but I've always heard it as a song about one person realizing that the person they're with is meant to be with someone else, maybe even a specific someone else (Irene?), but the person they're with may not even realize that yet. This story unfolds in the first few minutes of the song, and then without any warning, the bottom drops completely out, the carpet pulled right out from under your feet, and the listener is suspended mid-air by a single note, struck repeatedly by itself. A single drum joins in, which seems to serve only as a painful marker of the lonely time passing by. It feels like the fourth stage of grief in song form, with all of it's loneliness and isolation.

And then, just when that repeated note becomes almost unbearable to hear in all of its loneliness, a warm bass line gently enters the mix, grounding both the song itself and the listener. Victoria Legrand eventually joins in again, singing "it's a strange paradise", nearly at a whisper. She sings it once, and then again, and again, then seemingly countless times, as if we are witnessing her convince herself of this paradise, as if she is resigning herself toward acceptance. The music grows from a muted background to an enveloping roar, but Legrand's voice never gets much louder than her original whisper. There is so much confidence and so much uncertainty on display, all at once,

Bloom came out in 2012, and it was the first Beach House record I really devoured. For whatever reason, though, I could never seem to access Irene. For years, I would turn it off even before the forty-five seconds of that repeated F#. But in the late months of 2013 and early 2014, I was stranded in my Silver Spring apartment one night, and as I was listening to Bloom for the thousandth time, I let it play through the end of the record. I was stranded here often, mostly because I wasn't really within walking distance of anything, and although I had a car, traffic and parking were always so unbearable that you might as well not go anywhere.

It was snowing on this particular night, but I didn't have anywhere to go anyway. I was also keenly aware that I had nobody nearby to see, even if I weren't stranded inside my 16th Street apartment. I made a choice earlier that year to move away from all of the good things in my life, to try out something new and risky, and I was sitting in the discomfort of my own self-inflicted isolation. I knew in my gut that I made the right decision to leave Harrisburg, but that certainly didn't make this particular evening, or the evenings like this, any more bearable. My lights were off, and I sat in the candlelight and watched the snow fall in our parking lot, leaving a lovely blanket of snow on top of the cars. A strange paradise, indeed.

Listen below.