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"Close Encounters" is a song performed by Bat For Lashes. It serves as the seventh track on Bat For Lashes' fourth album, The Bride.
Background[]
At first, Natasha thought people were going to think she was crazy to put out such song, that it was really “avant-garde”. However, it has been one of the tracks that people have talked about and loved the most.[1]
Music and composition[]
She told The Guardian that the song is "about making love to someone from the other side."[2] In an interview with Rolling Stone Australia, Natasha said it’s her favourite and there was a struggle to get it right:
"I scrapped everything I’d done on it four days before we were supposed to finish the album, it was a pop song girl-groupy Shangri-Las sounding thing. The record company were quite pleased about it and I was like, ‘Nooooo, I want warped, weird strings all over it and I want it to be really scary and dark!‘ And they were like, ‘Oh no’, but I just wasn’t happy with it, and I knew it wasn’t happy being dressed up in those clothes."[3]
Natasha revealed on her Veeps live stream on 16 May 2020 that the song was originally written on the omnichord and performed it in its original form.[4]
"One of my biggest [struggles] was on a song called "Close Encounters." It has a very folky three-time kind of swing-like melody that's very strong, and all the way up until the last few weeks after I'd been working on the album for years, it had been an old school-girl-group-sounding love song, and it just wasn't sitting right with me. I was having sleepless nights feeling so anxious. In the end, I came into the studio one morning and I was like, We have to scrap everything and start again. Then I set to work with [the composer] David Baron , who has all of these incredible 1930s B-movie string samples that were so eerie and beautiful, and we set to work arranging these strings, and I basically just put my vocal [on top] of these really discordant warped strings. I was worried everyone [was] going to think that I'm really crazy, that this [was] really avant-garde, but it's been one of the tracks that people have talked about and loved the most."[1]
This is the song on The Bride that Natasha Khan is proudest of. She explained to Uncut:
"I'm proudest of 'Close Encounters' because it spent most of the recording as a Shangri Las-style girl group song. In the last week of recording, I knew something was wrong, so I scrapped the whole thing. In one day, we found this really crazy old sample and f--ked it up, put a choir through a Vocoder, added a heartbeat and dark strings. It became exactly what it should be."
Lyrics[]
Some say my lover is a pale green light
He hovers high where the moon shines bright
I feel him come to me in the dead of night
And I go to the other side
And when he lovingly takes my hand
Pulls me close to a windswept land
I can't make anybody else understand
How I go to the other side
You know that I'll love you till the stars don't shine
You know that you'll always fill this heart of mine
And I could never forget with time
All our close encounters
All our close encounters
And on the other side, he's all around
He is a starry beam that lays me down
And we become a dream of time and sound
When I go to the other side
You know that I'll love you till the stars don't shine
You know that you'll always fill this heart of mine
And I could never forget with time
All our close encounters
All our close encounters
All our close encounters
Official versions[]
- Album version — 04:09
- Livestream at Home. Los Angeles, 2021 (album) — 03:58
Credits[]
Personnel
- Natasha Khan — songwriting, production, vocals, synths and string arrangement,
- David Baron — programming, synths, string arrangement
- Sandy Bell — backing vocals
- Rachael Yamagata — backing vocals
- Technical
- Recorded At The Retreat Brighton & Ohayo Mountain, Woodstock, NYC
References[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Potts, Dianca (17 June 2016). "Music Monday: An Interview with Bat For Lashes". LENNY.
- ↑ "Bat For Lashes: 'Even in Sex And The City, the single girls end up with someone'". 7 May 2016. The Guardian.
- ↑ http://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/bat-for-lashes-interview-the-bride/4389-page-1
- ↑ "Live Stream from L.A. 🖤 Bat For Lashes". YouTube.