Songfacts®:

• Inspired by her newborn daughter, Julia Holter attempted to create "a realm that's waterlike, fluid, evoking the body's internal sound world," for her sixth album, Something in the Room She Moves. This instrumental track captures the awe-inspiring beauty and primal mystery of the sea at night.
• Holter co-wrote "Ocean" with longtime collaborator Devin Hoff (bass, composition, arrangement) and saxophonist/composer Chris Speed.
  
  "I started it at home as a demo, mainly using an old analog synth called a Cadio CS-60 and my Nord Stage," Holter told Uncut magazine. "Yes, it was an abnormally ambient thing for me very minimal, I fell in love with the sound of it. I kept listening to it in a car during the most anxiety inducing times of the pandemic! Then we took it into the studio, and we' got Chris Speed and Dev to improvise over it, on clarinet and double bass respectively, in real time. So, it's became this collaborative thing. I love how that turned out."
• Inspiration for the album struck after Holter, a new mom, introduced her first daughter to the 2008 Japanese animated fantasy film Ponyo. The themes of transformation and fluidity – a goldfish princess yearning for the human world – resonated deeply with Holter, who was experiencing her own physical changes during pregnancy.
  
  "It was her first-ever movie," she told The Independent. "I was suddenly having these crazy horror feelings I'd never experienced. It was crazy how intense it was. I've never felt hormonal changes like that."
• The album title, Something In The Room She Moves, has been framed as a feminist reimagining of a classic Beatles lyric, but the origin story is much more prosaic. Working on a Logic Pro file, the title simply popped into her head. She'd just watched Peter Jackson's documentary Get Back and was singing a lot of Beatles songs to her newborn baby. "I had to name it something and for some reason, I wrote that," Holter said to The Independent.
  
  Holter admitted she initially wrote "something in the room he moves."
  
  "But I don't know why, and then I changed it. I don't really have a logical explanation," she shrugged. "I think it is to do with capturing the subconscious at a moment in time, preserving it or something."