BEACH HOUSE - MYTH (ARR., 2026)

Instrumentation: Piano

I'd been thinking that it would be a good career move to do a piano cover of a song that people like, but it would need to be one that hasn't been covered a thousand times already, isn't written for piano anyway and is musically interesting enough that arranging it would mean using creativity and imagination in some way.

I love songs that are perfectly serviceable as 'Pop' music but seem to defy the rules of songwriting or do something singular once you to start to look at them closer (Roy Orbison songs for example, like In Dreams which doesn't even have a chorus is more of a composition than a song as such, or many many Prince songs, I Wanna Be Your Lover of which doesn't seem unusual at first but is fabled to have have helped inflict Max Martin songs on us all due to an interesting structural quirk).

Leaving aside all the potentially subjective interesting stuff about Myth (it definitely has a 'feeling' to it), it got more interesting the closer I looked at it. What would you say the 'chorus' is, if it has one at all? It seems like it should be part in Ab major (the 'found yourself...' line), but that only happens once and it's not even like the rest of builds to it as it happens somewhere in the middle of the song. Plus they don't say the word myth which would have been a big clue ('what is this, some kind of myth?'). You shouldn't impose form on music, sometimes people do things that show that they're letting themselves do right by their material and ideas and it gives you a clue that they're very good musicians.

From my years of Beethoven studies, I also know a musician who has studied composition at least a bit when I hear them if there is a bit of teleology/end-weightedness to their music. I think there isn't a chorus in this song because it isn't structured as a song in the verse-chorus sense as such, it's instead structured as more of a composition in the sense that the guitar solo at the end is the 'destination'. Long-range, it develops almost linearly, literally in the sense that it starts with stark percussion and ends with the maximally orchestrated solo, and more technically in the sense that each section is a slight thickening in the textural parameter on the previous (except for the refrain/return to the verse after the Ab section, but even then verse three is a slight textural development on verse two). It's done very subtly and skilfully--if you compare verses one and two, you'll hear that the only difference is the addition of a pad in verse two, but it makes a big difference (I'll revisit an earlier point here--if you go back and listen to I Wanna Be Your Lover, you'll hear that the only difference between the verse and the chorus is the reintroduction of the high synth and the higher guitar chucking. Not a single other thing changes in the instrumentation, nothing changes melodically, yet your ear doesn't hear repetition. Chopin himself said that it is simplicity that is the crowning achievement in art. You have to remind yourself how much you can do with not a lot). The solo really rewards close listening once you get there. They really let it rip, justifiably so, and make sure you don't miss the reverbed vocals in the background.

The heart of the song is of course that arpeggio that starts after the percussion intro and runs through the entire thing barring the Ab section. Omitting it at any time risks it losing the spirit and character of the song, so the technical challenge is figuring out ways of keeping it running while fitting in everything else around it. There a few piano covers on YouTube and people have met this challenge in different ways. One simply layers recordings to achieve the effect, while the other changes the register or omits it in places to accommodate the other material. I thought aiming to make this the arrangement that keeps the arpeggio at the forefront would give it a clear purpose, make it a worthwhile challenge, and make it the convincing piece of solo-piano music that I wanted it to be. At some point while working on it, I found that dropping the arpeggio at any point when it's supposed to be heard kind of ruins the flow of the piece, so I adhered to my rules more strictly than I thought I would need to (more on that later).

Arranging anything for piano means severely restricting your access to the parameter of timbre for expressive purposes. Something becomes unarrangeable or untranslatable where it is based solely in timbre (there are no sunn O))) piano arrangements) , while something like Myth, where timbre is vital to its character and feel, makes arranging impossible without losing these intangible but important aspects. Have a look at this very helpful transcription of the full song by someone on Musescore to see the ingredients of the arpeggio:

I knew that the guitar solo would be the part that would give me the most creative freedom. I worked on the whole song sequentially and thought right until I got to the solo that I would orchestrate it maximally and make it feel kind of distinct from the other sections. Once I got there, I found that changing the texture at that point immediately killed the all the energy and tension that they skilfully build in the song until then so instead went with the simpler but not-less-difficult challenge of trying to fit both the solo and arpeggio into one part. I started quite literally with a stave for solo and an extra stave for the arpeggio then went about combining them.

This wasn't too easy to play at first but it's perfectly doable with a bit of practice (your right hand plays it through most of the piece, so you need to be able to do it fluently for several minutes). The clashing of the D and Eb could be a bit too jarring of a dissonance but to my ears I've found that it doesn't stand out so much as to be a distraction.

The voicings of subsequent chords necessitates some hand-crossing to catch everything. Towards the end of the verse, the voice moves up into the the register that the keyboard and guitar are already playing at, so at that point there are essentially three instruments competing for the same set of notes (this is the Fm7 chord, at the 'help me to name it' line). I'll have to rescore this part at some point to make it clearer what each hand is supposed to be doing (the upper voice in the left-hand part reaches higher than the lower voice in the right-hand part, but both those voices need to be played with the left hand) but this version at least makes the trajectory of each voice clear.

It's made up of some kind of keyboard (surely not a 'piano' as such) and guitar, and you'll see that both instruments are playing in the exact same register (note the clef of the guitar part, it's being played an octave below what is written), often doubling notes, distinguishable only by timbre, the mish-mashing of which gives whatever the weird 'feeling' that the song has is. This means that simply playing pitches does not accurately represent what is being heard in the song and can't be played as written by a single piano anyway. The song is not simply the sum of its pitches.

I managed to make the closest possible approximation, though, with this figure:

This means using a fairly difficult but doable technique of playing in octaves while maintaining a second voice with the inner fingers. I expect there's a Chopin etude that prepares serious pianists for that kind of thing but I had to practice slowly for a while to get the balance right (it's a lot easier than it seems with the right fingering though). If there isn't dynamic contrast between the inner and outer fingers they don't really sound like two separate voices. I was surprised how effective the results were when the process behind it was so simple. It sounds there's way more happening than there really is. Interestingly, there is a bit of an auditory illusion at play in this section as arpeggio isn't played note-for-note accurately but it sounds like it is. I fit in what I could and your brain kind of fills in the rest, maybe because you've heard it so much by then that you hear it even when it's not there.

I still have no idea what the song is about, and I have no desire to know either. I'm happy with the general impression it leaves.

Here's my progress with learning the solo part