Beck

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Essential Albums

  • Sea Change
    Sea Change
    Sea Change

    Reflecting on the collapse of an almost decade-long relationship, Beck Hansen’s eighth studio album often draws comparisons to Bob Dylan’s classic 1975 breakup record Blood on the Tracks. The parallels certainly hold up, especially with Hansen’s voice hanging at a notably lower register than on 1998’s similarly mellow Mutations, and the mercurial performer setting aside his sample-based busy-ness to bask in spacious, elaborate ballads alongside a masterful backing band. His father, David Campbell, even arranged the dynamic and often dramatic strings. Another key collaborator here is producer/mixer Nigel Godrich, who helmed Mutations and the bulk of Radiohead’s catalog. Godrich is responsible for the incredible depth of space that makes this introspective material feel even more profoundly personal. That’s not to say the record is a downer: herein lies some of the most moving songwriting of Hansen’s career. “Lost Cause” is gorgeous despite its resigned refrain (“Baby, you’re a lost cause”), and the strings inject chamber-pop grandeur into his open-hearted vulnerability on “Lonesome Tears.” The album’s confiding air extends to the Nick Drake-esque “Round the Bend” and “It’s All In Your Mind,” a lush reimagining of a lo-fi 1995 B-side. While the scratchy slide guitar of “Little One” does hark back to Beck’s earlier days, “Sunday Sun” gently swells with more unusual instrumental bedfellows (including bamboo sax, multiple banjos, and Wurlitzer). Most of all, these songs feel timeless in a way that’s new for the perpetually evolving entertainer. Not the only tune to mention the past by name, “Paper Tiger” combines a spry rhythm section and close-looming strings to evoke “Ain’t No Sunshine”-era Bill Withers. There and elsewhere, Beck’s vocals and lyrics are strikingly understated—especially compared to his past forays into rapping and falsetto. On a similar note, it’s telling that his harmonica part on “Guess I’m Doing Fine” is a subtle parting gesture rather than the usual scene-stealing flourish. Multi-instrumentalists Smokey Hormel, Justin Meldal-Johnsen, and Joey Waronker fluidly change course as each song requires, and Godrich himself lends some keys and percussion. No singles from Sea Change were released for radio, prompting the album to be taken as a whole, and it instantly became one of Beck’s mostly roundly acclaimed releases. Even after he returned to his collage-like approach for 2005’s Guero, these melancholy reflections have continued to resonate as a major creative milestone rather than a fleeting catharsis.

  • Mutations
    Mutations
    Mutations

    Where could Beck go after the brain-busting audacity of 1996’s Odelay? The answer is inwards. Yet this more subdued outing has its own share of winking zigs and zags. Mutations sees the Los Angeles native continue to reframe his stylistic homages with absurdist wordplay and wonky touches—only more quietly this time. Linking up with trusted Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich, Beck also invites in enough studio gloss and soft psychedelic flourishes to make this ballad-leaning material considerably lusher than the lo-fi ruminations of 1994’s One Foot in the Grave. That means synths and strings mingle happily with harpsichord and harmonica, even before Beck begins to dabble freely across genre lines. Opener “Cold Brains” leisurely unspools as deadpan cosmic folk, while “Nobody’s Fault But My Own” maintains the trippy streak with drawling sitar washes. The latter has become one of Beck’s most enduring tunes, with Marianne Faithfull covering it for her 2002 album Kissin Time. Kissed with shakers and castanets, “Lazy Flies” brandishes some of his most vividly abstract lyrics—“They’re chewing dried meat in a house of disrepute/The dust of opiates and syphilis patients on brochure vacations”—while musical motifs flutter in and out of frame with whimsical irregularity. As for those sidelong tributes to other genres? “Canceled Check” sidles up to honky tonk with steel guitar and saloon-style piano, before unsteady horns foreshadow a slip into knowing disarray. “Tropicalia” takes both its name and vibe from the late-1960s Brazilian fusion of bossa nova, psych, and other outside elements, while “O Maria” sits comfortably between classic New Orleans R&B and early Randy Newman. The slow and open “Sing It Again” verges on flamenco-style guitar, whereas “Bottle of Blues” plays into the Dylan-esque patchwork quality of its lyrics. Initially presented as a hidden track, the harder-rocking outlier “Diamond Bollocks” openly flirts with crunchy glam rock and Beach Boys harmonies. Muted in comparison to the extroverted channel-surfing of Mellow Gold and Odelay, Mutations proved that Beck could experiment on a more subliminal level—and even pluck some unexpected heartstrings amidst all of that self-awareness. He would return to this mode to great effect for 2002’s breakup record Sea Change and 2014’s richly embellished Morning Phase. From the guy who first introduced himself to the world as a loser, that cozy batch of albums provides a strong argument for his actual status as a timeless, deeply nuanced songwriter.

  • Odelay (Deluxe Edition)
    Odelay (Deluxe Edition)
    Odelay (Deluxe Edition)

    In the months leading up to Odelay’s release in 1996, Beck remembers a famous record producer inviting him to go for a drive. I’ve heard your album, the producer told him. Don’t release it. Huge mistake. Start over. Make something real—a real album, with real songs. Beck was crestfallen. His first album, 1994’s <I>Mellow Gold</I>, had made him a cult favorite and critical fascination, but he was still a ways off from solid ground. “I was 24,” he tells Apple Music, on the album’s 25th anniversary. “I had virtually no money, and had just spent about $300,000 making this record. I thought I’d be paying it off working in a minimum-wage job for a decade.” By now, we know what happened. But you can imagine what the producer was thinking. As much as <I>Odelay</I> reflects the past—the dusty samples, the kitschy callbacks to ’60s pop (“The New Pollution”), ’70s country (“Sissyneck”), and ’80s hip-hop (“Where It’s At”)—it also presages an attention-deficient future where we cobble stories together from fragments and feel our focus constantly shifting from one shiny object to the next. At the time, people didn’t have cell phones, and the biggest bands on the radio were post-grunge artists like Smashing Pumpkins and Silverchair. Within a couple of years, we’d start hearing the pastiche of artists like Gorillaz and Fatboy Slim. But a couple of years can mark an era—<I>Odelay</I> was where we were going, but we weren’t there quite yet. The execution is experimental, but the source material is folksy and earthbound, the hand-me-downs of distant uncles and yard sales. Beck remembers sifting through samples with the album’s producers, The Dust Brothers, not just as an exercise in finding cool sounds, but in cultural archeology. Or, as he puts it, “let’s take a moment on a forgotten record that nobody has ever heard, that tangentially has nothing to do with the harmonic structure of the song or any of the actual hook or songwriting of the song…and let's make that the centerpiece of a new piece of music.” You might come for the style (“Devils Haircut”) or the smart-ass humor (“Lord Only Knows”), but at the heart of Odelay is a sense of play and fascination, of wandering wonderstruck through a junkyard of things half-remembered and half-experienced and building your world anew. The album’s cover famously featured the image of an absurd, mop-like dog called the Komondor, leaping over a hurdle—a dog whose puppy, in a simple twist of fate, Beck ended up living up the street from. When he first saw the image, he laughed out loud. But he also felt a pang of kinship. “I feel like I’m trying to achieve the impossible of clearing this hurdle that I’m not even remotely qualified to clear,” he remembers thinking. “I don’t even know what I’m doing.” Maybe not. But he did it.

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About Beck

Since the early ’90s, Beck has traveled a decidedly idiosyncratic path—and it has taken him from slacker-pop iconoclast to genre-melding elder statesman. Born in 1970, Beck Hansen got his musical start in New York’s anti-folk scene; his relocation to Los Angeles led to him incorporating hip-hop-inspired sounds, a combo that helped “Loser,” his chugging yet surrealistic breakthrough, go from college-radio oddity to one of 1994’s defining singles. Over the ensuing years, Beck became known for defying any expectations “Loser” had placed on him; he went back to his indie roots on 1994’s One Foot in the Grave before getting maximalist on 1996’s ambitious Odelay, exploring bossa nova and blues on Mutations two years later, and reveling in grooves on the following year’s Midnite Vultures. All the while, his high-energy live sets became the stuff of Lollapalooza legend, and his eye-catching videos were staples of MTV. In 2002 he released the stripped-down Sea Change, an introspective album that, to great acclaim, showed off the sensitive side of someone previously pegged as an ironist. Beck settled into being a pop explorer after that, releasing sterling singles—the sun-dappled “Girl,” the breezy “Gamma Ray,” the stadium-ready “E-Pro”—that anchored hook-filled albums. He put his songwriting prowess forward on Song Reader, which was released as a book of sheet music in 2012, and on Morning Phase, which called back to the Sea Change era with its subdued vibes. As the decade progressed, Beck incorporated ideas borrowed from big-ticket pop, working with producers such as Pharrell Williams and Greg Kurstin on his albums Colors and Hyperspace—but he retained the wide-ranging approach that’s made him one of the alt-rock boom’s most enduring stars.

FROM
Los Angeles, CA, United States
BORN
July 8, 1970
GENRE
Alternative

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