Each

I remember a very clear change of perspective in the earliest days of writing The Beach. I had planned a summer tour of the South with my friends Boothe and Emily Lyon and had been working on live versions of Boothe's electronic & surreal pop experiments. I had been listening to a a lot of Yello and Sonic Youth and I decided that I wanted to perform songs that could match the emotional and rhythmic highs of these bands. I remember watching my friend Grace Ives dance and connect so emphatically to audiences on a previous tour with faster tempos and harder sounds. I knew that those things were in me too but I needed to figure out how to access them. I wrote 10 songs in one week to perform on that tour. Four of them are on the album. The tour taught me a lot about what it was like to perform dance music and it brought me to an emotional point that was surprising and rewarding. These songs were about my ex-boyfriend (with whom I had cut off contact a few months prior) and, though I didn't realize it yet, they were also about my mother who would die 5 months later. I remember a show in Atlanta at an abandoned store front where I began to cry midway through the set and didn't stop until we got to the apartment of whoever was hosting us. This was very new to me. Maybe a little bit over the top, maybe a combo of being too dehydrated, too stoned, too hot, too much driving.