Songfacts®:

• "Summerland" is a dreamy, sun-dappled shuffle that carries with it the quiet romance of tragedy. Inspired by Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader's ill-fated attempt to cross the Atlantic in a 13 ft (4.0 m) sailboat, the song finds beauty in his fatal misadventure.
• Deal recorded "Summerland" for her debut solo album, Nobody Loves You More. Her fascination with Ader's story is further evidenced by the album cover, which recreates a photograph of Ader taken just before his ill-fated voyage. The cover shows Deal on a raft with her musical equipment, mirroring Ader's final documented moments.
• Summerland is a house in the Florida Keys that Deal and her parents rented for their holidays. She wrote the song on a ukulele given to her by the producer Steve Albini and his wife after Kim and Kelley Deal handled the music at the couple's Hawaiian wedding.
  
  "I threw it in the car on the way down to Florida," Deal recalled in an interview with Billboard. "I thought I'd mess around with it. And all of a sudden, my fingers were making these four-chord formations, and I really liked it."
  
  Albini, who also produced Deal's group the Pixies, died of a heart attack before the Nobody Loves You More album was released.
• Deal's ukulele on the song is decorated with sparkling strings. The orchestration was inspired by the music from the 1955 Kim Novak and William Holden film Picnic – a favorite of Deal's parents, particularly its theme song, "Moonglow."
• Deal arranged the strings, painstakingly transcribing each note from her head using a Casio keyboard and four-track.
  
  "It just has this nice little groove going," she explained to Uncut magazine. "Then the strings come in really high, really magical. When I was playing the uke I heard it in my head. I heard the strings. So while I'm playing this uke and croaking out my vocals, in my head is this gorgeous string arrangement happening, but it was really difficult to put it down - because it sounds so good in your head, but I wasn't gonna stop. I was going to make it happen because it was so loud in my head."
• The ukulele, by nature of its soft, lilting tone, would have likely been a non-starter for Deal's group The Breeders, particularly with their bass player Josephine Wiggs, who Deal refers to as an "old-school goth."
  
  "I knew that would really bum Josephine out in such a deep, profound way it could never be a Breeders' song," Deal told Mojo magazine.
  
  And so, "Summerland" was destined to remain solely in the world of Kim Deal.