When you hit play on Water From Your Eyes’ new album, It’s a Beautiful Place, you’re taking a journey to the farthest reaches of outer space and the tiniest limits of microscopic reality. You’re also listening to a bunch of stunningly original songs made by the New York-based duo of multi-instrumentalist/producer Nate Amos and vocalist Rachel Brown. Out now on Matador Records, it’s the first album this impossible-to-classify group has made with the knowledge that a big audience is listening to their zany experiments.
In their recent Rolling Stone feature, Amos and Brown talked about their whole story up to and including the making of this LP, but there was plenty that we couldn’t fit into that article. Here, we present more of the deep thoughts, sideways concepts, and inside jokes behind the 10 tracks on Water From Your Eyes’ new album.
“One Small Step”
It’s a Beautiful Place opens with an oddly mesmerizing instrumental loop whose title alludes to Neil Armstrong’s first words when he set foot on the moon in July 1969. For some reason — perhaps a distant kinship with the “Baba O’Riley” keyboards — this piece of music reminds Amos of the cover art for 1971’s Who’s Next, in which the four members of the Who appear to have just finished urinating on a large concrete block. “For years and years, that was on my computer as ‘Piss Monolith,’” he says. “To me, that’s the most interesting thing on the whole album.”
“Life Signs”
Next up is this wild blizzard of riffs. With rapid-fire flashes of nu-metal, alt-rock, electronic, and pop production styles, “Life Signs” is a song that probably shouldn’t work on paper, but totally does when you hear it. They chose to release it as the first single from It’s a Beautiful Place. “I think about first singles from albums like that scene in Lord of the Rings where Aragorn comes into the hall,” Amos says. “Certain songs feel like bigger doors to be busting through, and ‘Life Signs’ felt like the biggest door we could be kicking down.”
Editor’s picks
Brown chooses another metaphor for this single’s awesome power: “It’s the most colorful hat.”
“It’s the brightest Hawaiian shirt,” Amos adds.
“Nights in Armor”
Track three starts off as an easy, breezy six-string jam, though it quickly veers into other territory. “This is the first album I’ve ever been involved in where it really does feel like a guitar album,” Amos says. “It’s funny,” Brown adds. “Nate used to be like, ‘Pedals are dumb.’ But now he’s the most guitar guy I’ve ever met in my life.”
“Born 2”
Brown drew on Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed for the lyrics to this track imagining other worlds. “Science fiction is an interesting genre,” they say. “You get to put all of the actual problems we face into a setting that’s just different enough that it’s not a bummer and people can enjoy it.”
“You Don’t Believe in God?”
The title of this instrumental track comes from a 2011 poem by Ada Limón called “What It Looks Like to Us and the Words We Use.” The poem, which Brown first encountered on social media, describes a conversation between two people walking in a valley. After being asked the question in the track’s title, the poem’s narrator replies, “No. I believe in this connection we all have/to nature, to each other, to the universe.”
“Spaceship”
This sun-kissed interstellar groove is the key to the album’s underlying concept. “The whole thing is kind of a journey into space and back, reinforcing your connection to the Earth,” Amos says. At one point, he wanted to emphasize that theme via an intensifying echo effect that peaked on this song, where “you’re fully in space,” but that idea proved divisive.
Related Content
“I usually don’t have much to say about music production, because that’s not my bag, and Nate’s a musical genius,” says Brown. “But the echoes Nate had originally were so nuts. I was like, ‘This is unlistenable. Bro, this is crazy.’”
Amos eventually conceded the point and took out most of the echo effects on the LP. “‘Spaceship’ was the high point on what would have been a really fucking tragic album that got scrapped,” he says. “I maintain that conceptually, it worked really well, but it also made them not realistically listenable pop songs. So I took one for the team.”
“Playing Classics”
This euphoric house anthem is quite possibly the catchiest song Water From Your Eyes have ever made. In press materials, they’ve noted the influence of Charli XCX and Brat Summer on its bright, clubby energy. When they spoke with Rolling Stone, they were about to head to a fireworks store in upstate New York to get some supplies for the “Playing Classics” music video, which features a sequence inspired by the video for Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “By the Way.” “It’s a well-known fact that we love the Red Hot Chili Peppers, so I thought it’d be really fun to do an homage,” Brown says.
In a full-circle touch, they hired James Dayton — a film-school friend of Brown’s whose parents, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, made the original RHCP video in 2002 — to direct this clip. “They can’t be like, ‘Man, this person really ripped us off,’ because it’s their son,” Brown observes.
“It’s a Beautiful Place”
The Chilis’ influence on this album is felt most strongly on its title track, which consists in its entirety of a psychedelic guitar solo whose sound Amos accurately describes as “Frusciante-core.” “When I’m playing guitar, I wear my influences on my sleeve a lot more obviously than when I’m just working with bleeps and bloops and shit,” he adds.
“Blood on the Dollar”
The guitars keep rolling into this song, whose straight-forward rock strumming and heartfelt melody recall “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door.” While Brown typically writes all of the band’s lyrics, the words for this one are credited as a rare Brown/Amos co-write. That’s because the chorus — “No enemy, nothing but skin/Blood on the dollar/God, make me wind” — was originally part of a song by Amos’ other band, This Is Lorelei. Brown tweaked the words to bring them in line with the themes of human existence and cosmic hugeness they were exploring on this album. “It’s about dying,” Brown says. “‘God, make me wind’ — it’s like, make me a part of the universe.”
“For Mankind”
The track list concludes by returning to the spacey instrumental formerly labeled as “Piss Monolith” on Amos’ hard drive. He likes the way that the album’s intro and outro work together as a framing device. “In between, you can go through all these different genres of music, and it’s all dwarfed by this other sound that’s more like something you’d hear in nature,” Amos says.
Trending Stories
He and Brown see that comparison between life here on Earth and the epic scale of the cosmos as a big part of what they’re doing on this album. “Everything we experience in our lives is just a fraction of a blip in the geological time of the Earth, let alone the universe,” Amos adds. “So if things are objectively so insignificant, what is it about consciousness that makes all the tiny things matter so much?”
“I have an answer,” Brown says. “Obviously, the universe is infinitely large, but also things are infinitely tiny. We’re so much bigger than electrons, yet we’re so much smaller than the Milky Way. So everything is relative. I think Einstein said that once.”
