Rebecca Schiffman – Beach Vacation
Rebecca Schiffman’s upcoming full-length, Before The Future, ruminates on existentialism, mental health, and memory.
The record is out this Friday, July 25, 2025, and features contributions from many of the most storied independent musicians active in Schiffman’s adopted home of Los Angeles. Today, the native New Yorker shares the album’s final single, “Beach Vacation,” which ruminates on intense childhood memories of mortality sparked by looking out at the ocean.
“This elemental affinity for the long, lost mother / Romantic notion, I’ll be in control / How could it not be so? / How could it not be so? / That I’d walk into the water,” Schiffman sings in a subdued early verse, before the song bursts into a dry, yet funky outro. In touch with mortality and the earth, “Beach Vacation” resurfaces a snapshot from a precocious young mind. It is accompanied by a generative art website coded by Peter Toh, which fragments beachy imagery in artfully abstract ways.
On the the single, Schiffman shares: “The song was sparked by an intense childhood memory, looking out at the ocean on a non-specific family trip to the beach, and just like when I was little I believed without a doubt in reincarnation, I felt sure I would some day end my life by walking into the sea. Sensations were more vivid then, I was less distracted by interior running commentary, less past to ruminate on, only the present and the vague future. This feeling felt so real and pure at the time, but looking back, surely I had just read ‘The Awakening’ in school. I like to imagine all moments being ever-present, like in Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’. The song comes around to wonder if the thoughts I had as a child could have been sent back from future me — compressing time — as if all stages of life are always present in some way.
I wrote the song on four steady single guitar notes and performed it that way for a while before recording. Luke Temple produced, we tracked the band live, and it took us several tries before we settled on what would become the groove.
For the video, I asked the writer Ruby Caster to take some iPhone footage with me at the beach. I asked Peter Toh of PTOH to create a lyric video using that footage as background, and suggested karaoke videos as a possible reference. It was a pleasant surprise when Peter came back with a generative video.”
On creating the generative music video, Peter Toh shares: “I wanted to explore the ideas within the lyrics relating to time, memory, ephemerality, and relationships, but especially the ‘now,’ so a generative art website felt more appropriate to Rebecca’s song. Using code allowed me to create a setting for the beach footage to behave in ways more similar to our memories, which fragment and revise themselves in each passing moment, and with more resemblance to the ocean, wind, and sand, by mixing spontaneity with patterns. The code produces a video that will never play the same way twice so each viewer can have a new personal experience each time that can’t be repeated. If you discover something in a passing moment, well, it’s gone now. It won’t happen again.”
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