Sky Beaming

Album: Performance (2018)
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Songfacts®:

  • White Denim's Performance album was more of a band collaborative record than anything they'd made before. Co-vocalists James Petralli and Steven Terebecki would start every day with a riff one of them had come up with, then they and the other group members would spend that day building up an arrangement. The goal was to have a semi-finished instrumental composition by the end of each day. This song originated with Terebecki. Petralli recalled to Uncut:

    "He had the entire form mapped out for us in demo form. He sent it to us and we just added out things to it. It's a bit bizarre, it took me a while to get my fingers around that one, for sure. I still don't really understand it."
  • The lyrics, written by James Petralli, came out of a songwriting exercise in which he grabbed a random five books and gave his bandmates 30 seconds to pick two words out of each of these books and write the two words on a chalkboard. He recalled to Relix:

    "We filled up the chalkboard - and it's really big - and then we just started creating this map and connecting phrases that would come out of instruction manuals to different kinds of fiction and stuff like that. Then I built the lyrics to that tune from that exercise."

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