“Scenic World” was first released as part of Zach Condon’s first album, Gulag Orkestar in 2006, then updated with different background music on Lon Gisland in December of the same year, once he had expanded Beirut into an eight-man mini-orchestra.

While the newer version has gone on to be more popular, the original one still has a strong following.
There’s a good case that the song is about how the lead singer and songwriter, Zach Condon, writes his songs. “As a teenager and a young adult, I never felt like my own story was interesting enough to tell, so I always wrote lyrics from someone else’s perspective– told someone else’s story,” he told Pitchfork in a 2011 interview. This song is about him escaping into those stories.