Space Song

2015 and How I Got There

Although 2015 is a significant jump into the future from my normal stomping grounds in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, I heard Space Song somewhere recently and it immediately soothed me like I had just taken a Benzo after so many years without. My shoulders lowered, my mouth curled into a smile, I sighed a breath of relief, and the slow, methodical, and relaxing meditation began. There has always been a strange effect on me spiritually with music that I can only describe as ethereal, moody, and massaging to my senses.

True to my love of the synthesizer through the years, Space Song and its band Beach House rely on it heavily and are best termed in the alternative/Indie world as “Beach Pop”. The tune was written as a breakup song and fits the theme in its slowly-paced melancholy. I cannot say I was experiencing what the lyric portrayed at the time of its release, but I do know that it could easily lower my blood pressure and take me to a quiet place when I listened to it with my eyes closed and headphones firmly attached.

In 2015 I was in my 20^th year at Sony Pictures Television in Culver City. I was a VP of Digital Marketing and Technology Operations. It was a role I would never have been able to believe I was capable of achieving in the years prior to my getting sober. I had a career with computers for crying out loud. I had never touched a computer until 1993 at the age of 35. There were no computers when I went to high school in the 1970s. There may have been some computers in the business school at Arizona State University when I made my first attempt at a college degree in 1976 and 1977.

As the story goes, my first sober job came in 1991 with a place called National Research Group. This was the market research company that had people standing outside of movie theaters recruiting for a free screening. The screenings were all about each of the major motion picture studios looking to figure out if their movies were going to be a hit or needed to be changed. In 1991 National Research Group did not have computers so my job was to take the questionnaire handouts they would distribute to the audience at the end of a free screening and code all of the answers to be totaled up so the studios could assess how their movie, their script, their plot, their actors, their ending, and various other parts of the film had done. Coding consisted of ticking off answers onto a master sheet. It was tedious, it was mundane, it was mind-numbing. However I was not exactly ready for hiring when I first got sober, so I remained grateful and did what was given to me to do.

At one point in my career at National Research Group, I was pulled out of the coding room and selected to go to the screenings for the films being rated and do the focus groups at the end of the show. For all of the people who had been afforded this free screening through an invitation, a couple of us would select members of the audience to represent and talk to a focus group leader about the different questions that the sheet highlighted and pull out as much information from them to appease the studio mucky-mucks. It was at these screenings that I met an executive from Warner Bros. who made it possible to move me out of National Research Group and into the world of production. The next thing I knew I was at an interview with a production coordinator for a film going into production called “Executive Decision” on the Warner Bros. lot.

This was the moment that changed my life.

In the interview, the production coordinator asked, “You know how to use a computer, right?” I answered with a lie as one would do in a situation like this and said “Yes.”

That evening, I called my sponsor in a panic and asked him to take me out to Frys, an electronic store popular in the 1990s and I bought my first computer. My sponsor helped me to set up the computer and in moments a long-held fear became a love affair. Before long I was teaching myself HTML and building websites. I was searching, researching, and discovering the new world at my fingertips. I was transformed completely, and nothing would ever be the same.

My hiring at Sony Pictures Television (at that time Columbia Tristar Television) had nothing to do with the computer love but didn’t hurt. And when on a fateful day our chief officer announced in a meeting that they were going to build a Business-to-business website for CTIT, and they were looking for someone to take on the lead role my hand shot up.

What does any of this have to do with 2015? Everything. I was in a lucrative role, making more money than I thought possible in this drug addict’s life, and I had been there for two decades. By 2015 I had learned so much about the industry, the digital world, and technology that I was considered a leader, and I could not believe how fortunate I had become.

At the same time, by 2015 I was recognizing my studio and technology mortality. At this point, I was approaching 60 years old and making the sort of money that could be significantly cut by hiring someone out of college. I always wondered how long the gig would last in a corporate, cost-cutting world, and what I would do if it ended. I had never achieved the college degree back in the 1970s having been in my addiction (ironically I would do just that after leaving Sony at the age of 60).

The point of the ethereal sounds that soothed me was my addictive escape mechanism with music. I had to put on the earphones nightly and sail away. There were all manner of sounds that I would gravitate towards, but the sound of beauty and sadness portrayed in “Space Song” calmed my inner fears and any unsteadiness I felt. When I hear the song today it makes me smile. It represents the period, but it also continues to give me the getaway I so love. Beach House is a group led by vocalist Victoria Legrand and guitarist Alex Scally. They had been around a good decade before the release of “Space Song” on the LP Depression Cherry, but my introduction came in 2015. I was happy to get acquainted and still use this trigger for soothing and ethereal retreats from the world around me.

It was late at night, you held on tight

From an empty seat, a flash of light

It will take a while, to make you smile

Somewhere in these eyes, I’m on your side

You wide-eyed girls, you get it right

Fall back into place

Fall back into place