Victoria Legrand ’03 to perform with Beach House

Mike Newmark Arts Editor

The warm, sensual duo Beach House (singer/organist Victoria Legrand ’03 and guitarist Alex Scally) concocts lovingly simple music that wouldn’t be out of place inside a dream. Three years after Legrand graduated from Vassar, the duo quietly dropped their debut album, Beach House, which was lauded by the press and landed at number 16 on Pitchfork’s Top 50 Albums of 2006. So, not only can Beach House lay claim to one of the brightest stars in the indie rock sky, it turns out that Legrand is thoughtful, insightful, and incredibly cool. In honor of Beach House’s April 19 show (at 5 p.m. in the Faculty Commons during Coffee House), The Miscellany News spoke with Legrand about her history, her music, and her Vassar experiences.

The Miscellany News: How did you and Alex meet, and what made you decide to make music together?
Victoria Legrand: We met when I moved to Baltimore in 2004. I’d just been living in Paris and I had decided to continue my musical life, and I moved to Baltimore because someone else I’d gone to Vassar with was living there. I didn’t feel like going to New York because it was too expensive. I met Alex through a friend and we started playing music together. And then that project fizzled out but Alex and I continued to make music together, which became Beach House.
MN: What was that other project like? Was it like Beach House at all?
VL: (laughs) It was like the complete opposite. Very bizarre, like dance music with organ. It was also just a very different phase in my life, involving a lot of, you know, dancing. But it was harder music, and it just got so weird by the end of it that it was like the music was this weird monster and we had no idea what was going on. It was going down some path that I didn’t want it to, so I wanted to call it quits. But Alex and I, we were sort of on the same page and we didn’t want to stop playing music together, so we just kept going, and it became this music that we had been imagining. While I was losing touch with this other project, I was always trying to get at something more simple. Less insane.
MN: Where did the name “Beach House” come from?
VL: We had numerous sessions about what we should call ourselves. It was pretty funny. We tried to describe all these otherworldly-type things, things that would reflect the way we sounded. And there was mention of a beach party on the moon. We already had a song called “House on the Hill,” and basically it just came out one day: Beach House. Why not just name it this? I think we were lucky.
MN: Do you feel that as a duo you and Alex achieve what you want better than you could as a trio, a quartet, or just yourself?
VL: I have to say I do, because Alex and I are kind of control freaks about doing things. It can get really intense writing with just one other person, because, you know, you’re just staring right at the other person. It’s very much more of an intimate experience. So yes, I do think we get a lot more of what we want to get out there by it just being the two of us. At some point, maybe we’ll expand it to multiple people in the future. Not saying that will never happen, but for the moment we’re sculpting the sounds that we like and seeing where they go. Two people seems to be working out right now.
MN: When I read reviews of your album, a word that frequently comes up is “autumnal.” And I admit, I think a lot of autumn leaves and warm colors when your music comes on. Was that at all what you were hoping to evoke?
VL: Not to be cheesy, but you just go with the feeling that you have when you’re writing something. And I think that the imagery and what it evokes in the listener is basically something that occurs when they walk a few steps back from what we’ve made. It’s something that is very much created by the spectator. I didn’t necessarily feel like, “Oh, I want to make an album for the autumn.” It just came out, and that was the response, which I think is great, because I think that all music, all visual art, everything should always evoke something that is, you know, far from us or something that we can’t understand.
MN: Sort of going off of that, how important were things like weather conditions and locations for writing and playing music?
VL: These songs were written in the summer, but if anything the heat made us go slower. It was a time in our lives when we were perpetually yearning to make sounds that we enjoyed playing, having been in a project that was so unenjoyable, and the summer and the heat and all of that really added to the intensity of it. But right now Alex and I are in the midst of writing a second record, and I think that we’re at a point right now where it actually doesn’t matter where we are. We just need the time and the place to write the songs, which I think is all that a musician can really ask for—enough time.
MN: Who do the words in your songs primarily address? Is the person you ask to lie down with you for a while in “Apple Orchard” the same person you call a “jack of all trades” in “Master of None”?
VL: Well, I won’t give away any secrets because I like the mystery of it, but I don’t think the subjects in any of the songs are specifically one person. So I kind of leave it up to what people make of it. These are coming from things I have felt in my life, but I always like to sort of envision another universe where I can be some sort of angry medusa and I get to talk to a choir of oracles or something (laughs). So the words mean something to me, but I don’t think I’ll ever say who they’re about for those reasons.
MN: So by taking that approach, were you hoping to make people try to translate your lyrics to their own lives?
VL: Absolutely. That’s all I would ask: translate it to your own lives. I want to see what people come up with. And they all do come up with something that means something to them. I wouldn’t want to write a record that was all about me, because I don’t really feel like that in my daily life, and I don’t think that anybody really should. Like I said earlier, I think music should always go beyond yourself. It should come from yourself, but end up being about someone else.
MN: What effect did Vassar have on you as a person?
VL: As a person, it made me have a bunch of crazy experiences. And it made me have a very strange sense of humor. I got pretty jaded there, but I also think my mind was able to be protected by being in a small place, enclosed, with lots of people, lots of trees, everything. But you also wonder what else is going to happen when you leave there, because you are sort of living in a bubble. But I think it gave me independence; I went to Paris afterward, where I got to be even more by myself. And I still see Vassar almost as if it was a dream, that I was there, that it even happened that I would be at college, that I was ever that young. I mean, I’m not old now but when I think of myself being 18 and a freshman, I feel so different. When I look back at it now and I come and see it I’m going to go, “God, this is so amazing walking around here.” I’d probably want to take different classes, sit outside and read all the time. But when I was there, you know, I’d be sitting outside listening to music or something.
MN: How about as a musician?
VL: I took singing lessons there, like opera. I wasn’t actually a music major, I was a theatre major. But the pianos in Skinner Hall I used to sit there and play. Musically, I just listened to tons of music when I was in college. And I played music too, I played in bands there. There were a lot of indie rockers at Vassar when I was going there; I don’t know what it’s like now, if it’s more mainstream or whatever, but at the time there were lots of people in bands playing parties and shows. I met a lot of people who knew a bunch of crazy stuff so it made me grow musically, in my mind.