Close Encounters (song)

**"Close Encounters"** is a song performed by Bat For Lashes. It serves as the seventh track on Bat For Lashes' fourth album, *The Bride*.

## Background

At first, Natasha thought people were going to think she was crazy to put out such song, that it was really “avant-garde”. However, it has been one of the tracks that people have talked about and loved the most.

## Music and composition

She told *The Guardian* that the song is "about making love to someone from the other side." In an interview with *Rolling Stone Australia*, Natasha said it’s her favourite and there was a struggle to get it right:

> "I scrapped everything I’d done on it four days before we were supposed to finish the album, it was a pop song girl-groupy Shangri-Las sounding thing. The record company were quite pleased about it and I was like, ‘Nooooo, I want warped, weird strings all over it and I want it to be really scary and dark!‘ And they were like, ‘Oh no’, but I just wasn’t happy with it, and I knew it wasn’t happy being dressed up in those clothes."
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Natasha revealed on her *Veeps* live stream on 16 May 2020 that the song was originally written on the omnichord and performed it in its original form.

> "One of my biggest [struggles] was on a song called "Close Encounters." It has a very folky three-time kind of swing-like melody that's very strong, and all the way up until the last few weeks after I'd been working on the album for years, it had been an old school-girl-group-sounding love song, and it just wasn't sitting right with me. I was having sleepless nights feeling so anxious. In the end, I came into the studio one morning and I was like, *We have to scrap everything and start again*. Then I set to work with [the composer] David Baron , who has all of these incredible 1930s B-movie string samples that were so eerie and beautiful, and we set to work arranging these strings, and I basically just put my vocal [on top] of these really discordant warped strings. I was worried everyone [was] going to think that I'm really crazy, that this [was] really avant-garde, but it's been one of the tracks that people have talked about and loved the most."
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This is the song on *The Bride* that Natasha Khan is proudest of. She explained to *Uncut*:

> "I'm proudest of 'Close Encounters' because it spent most of the recording as a Shangri Las-style girl group song. In the last week of recording, I knew something was wrong, so I scrapped the whole thing. In one day, we found this really crazy old sample and f--ked it up, put a choir through a Vocoder, added a heartbeat and dark strings. It became exactly what it should be."
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## Lyrics

Some say my lover is a pale green light

He hovers high where the moon shines bright

I feel him come to me in the dead of night

And I go to the other side

And when he lovingly takes my hand

Pulls me close to a windswept land

I can't make anybody else understand

How I go to the other side

You know that I'll love you till the stars don't shine

You know that you'll always fill this heart of mine

And I could never forget with time

All our close encounters

All our close encounters

And on the other side, he's all around

He is a starry beam that lays me down

And we become a dream of time and sound

When I go to the other side

You know that I'll love you till the stars don't shine

You know that you'll always fill this heart of mine

And I could never forget with time

All our close encounters

All our close encounters

All our close encounters

## Official versions

* Album version — 04:09
* Livestream at Home. Los Angeles, 2021 (album) — 03:58

## Credits

**Personnel**

* Natasha Khan — songwriting, production, vocals, synths and string arrangement,
* David Baron — programming, synths, string arrangement
* Sandy Bell — backing vocals
* Rachael Yamagata — backing vocals

**Technical**
* Recorded At The Retreat Brighton & Ohayo Mountain, Woodstock, NYC

## References

1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Potts, Dianca (17 June 2016). "Music Monday: An Interview with Bat For Lashes". *LENNY*.
2. ↑ "Bat For Lashes: 'Even in Sex And The City, the single girls end up with someone'". 7 May 2016. *The Guardian*.
3. ↑ http://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/bat-for-lashes-interview-the-bride/4389-page-1
4. ↑ "Live Stream from L.A. 🖤 Bat For Lashes". *YouTube*.