Zebra by Beach House Song Info
(12/3/09): “I came up with this guitar line in Australia, and Victoria said “I like that!” So it grew, over the course of 9 months, into the song you hear now. It was named by Victoria based entirely on something she perceived with the sound and the movement of the guitar.” ~ Alex, WOW (3/4/10): Just curious, but does ‘Zebra’ have the same chord progression as ‘No Other One’ by Weezer, off of Pinkerton? “That’s funny, I never put that together, but the first half of that phrase are the same exact chord, which is in 3/4. It’s a waltz; we do it like a 4/4 waltz and we do it like a swing, a ballad, or whatever. I don’t think we ever thought of it, but whenever you hear a chord progression in a song it’s probably been used 45 times and often at the same exact tempo and even with a similar arrangement. It’s just amazing that there are now something like 40 billion songs and they’re not all constantly sounding like each other.” ~ Alex, cokemachineglow (9/28/10): “I was randomly playing the opening guitar part in Australia when we were there in 2008, and I remember Victoria said, “I liked that, remember that,” which always encourages me a lot, ‘cause if she hears something in something then I know that it could be good; and I started thinking about it a lot, and then another part grew out of that, and I started playing it for Victoria, and instantly… she said “the way it sounds, it sounds like a Zebra, like running or crisscrossing,” and she started bringing this entire narrative to it, and then the song grew from there. So it was just a couple of little guitar parts, and everything started building from them.” ~ Alex, FaceCulture (4/29/19): “Alex had written most of the musical arrangement and when I heard it, this was another brain looking in on what somebody else had created, and I immediately thought, I had written some things but the zebra imagery kept coming to my brain. It was what I was seeing, the patterns crossing. That comes from comes from the music and how the music ignited something in my mind and my visual imagination.” ~ Victoria, KEXP
