Songfacts®:

• Canadian indie-rock trio Half Moon Run are plagued by memories of a relationship that once held the promise of love and family on this track from their fourth album, Salt. In a 2023 Songfacts Podcast interview, singer Devon Portielje described the tune as being "a bit manic, but it's sad and it's yearning and it's a mix of a lot of different things."
• The song takes its name from its unusual 9/4 time signature. "It's hard to put music to a signature like that and make it feel natural without sounding like an annoying prog-rock group or something," Portielje told Songfacts. "So that took a lot of massaging to find chords, and the time that you play the chords, and for how long and to make it feel natural. That took on and off for a few years to try and find something that worked."
• The band wrote and recorded the album during the COVID-19 pandemic, which found them diving into their archives for hidden gems - including fragments of what became "9Beat."
  
  "We had piled up 104, 2-track recordings of this song that I had archived, and one day I went through every single one, the whole thing," Portielje recalled. "I didn't fast forward, and I listened to any arrangements that felt like they were elevated, or any lyrics that I happened to shout out from the ether, from the gibberish I'd been singing to just, 'Oh, that's nice.'
  
  One beacon of good hope came up, and I was like, 'What the hell is that? That's cool. What do I even mean there?' Maybe that's a theme."
  
  Despite landing on an idea, the song was far from finished, so the band was dismayed when their producer, Connor Seidel, picked the demo out of the pile. As it turned out, Seidel's input was exactly what the song needed. Said Portielje: "We managed to find an arrangement with his guidance that really did it for us, finally."
• Half Moon Run debuted in 2012 with the release of their Dark Eyes album and earned critical acclaim for their three-part harmonies. Their first three singles put them in the Top 30 on Canada's alternative-rock chart.