Beck
Published by Under The Radar

I'm on my way to L.A.'s Chateau Marmont hotel to interview Beck. As I sit in traffic I think of ways to be clever. No, it's not about me, but you can't blame a guy for wanting to match wits with one of the masters. Perhaps this river of raw sewage flowing just past the upscale boutiques of Sunset Plaza will provide some paradoxical fodder. Maybe Beck and I can share a laugh over one of these seven-dollar bronze elephants they're selling at the gas station (I don't have the cash). Maybe there's something funny under the seat of my car.

But I've heard Beck's new album, Sea Change, and I should know that the best of my bullshit will only amount to so much.

As his new batch of songs would indicate, Beck is as serious as he is funny. If you've seen his shows, you know that dry anecdotes, self-deprecation, and ramshackle ditties are as likely as album tracks. At a recent one he riffed on the idea of the contemporary protest singer rallying outside the malls of his L.A., and credited his guitar/harmonica routine to the teachings of a mythical Folksinger Institute of Technology. He then tried to outfox the lighting guy. He also admitted to feeling vulnerable.

Where Beck's style of stage banter is thinking out loud, his interview voice is soft, slow, and heavy with thinking. He's not crazy about this business of his being ironic, and he'd rather not be thought of as musically gene-spliced, something he's been contending with for the last couple of days. "I'm a music fan," Beck says, "but to me it's a little bit lazy for someone to say you sound like a cross between this and that. It's more of a challenge to actually hear it and articulate what it sounds like to you."

It's also a challenge to make that a difficult task. Sea Change is neither a this-meets-that hybrid nor a Beck album as we know it. Sure, Beck's written personal stuff before. "Even 'Loser.' It was equal in intensity in a completely different context," he says. But this time he's really laying it out -- and lots of it. His latest is gentle, majestic, and not out to be clever. You might say it's not out to be anything -- or at least anything relying on language skills in overdrive. Beck says, "On this album I was trying to write songs that any singer could sing. They weren't necessarily specific to me. I wasn't trying to get too clever with it. I was just trying to be real direct and honest about the emotion, and bold about what I was feeling at the time, without being afraid of it being too sentimental or banal."

And what are those emotions? Listen to the record. Sure, Beck has had some girl trouble since he graced the bins in 1999 with the cyber-funk romp Midnite Vultures, but I ain't askin' him about it. "The song kind of explains itself," he says of "Lost Cause," and that pretty much goes for the rest of Sea Change. He pulls no punches in the songs, but I've gathered that he doesn't consider interviews the place for dissecting lines like "Seen the love you had turning into hate." And that's okay. Part of the beauty of Sea Change is that, like few records in recent memory, it really requires no elaboration from its creator. Affirming what the song paints so beautifully, Beck does say of "The Golden Age": "It's like one of those movies where you see the last scene at the beginning. It's the driving off into the distance and letting it all wash off you; starting back at zero and getting on the road again; trying to get somewhere worth getting to." I'd say he's arrived in style.

It's no surprise that Beck put much thought into the sound of his new album. As a smooth yet engaging delivery system for his confessionals, Sea Change weds the mellow to the magnificent and sends them on a honeymoon to a Hotel California where Don Henley's the bellhop and Radiohead's producer stokes the sound system. With Nigel Godrich at the board, the album doesn't lack sonic ambition, but it wasn't a matter of inviting Kid A to the sessions either. "It was always about how little we could do," says Beck. "We were always getting really quickly to the point where there was too much. As far as things Nigel added, he recommended that we play things a lot slower than I'd written them. The album's much slower than I'd intended, but it actually really works, and now, when I play live, I play the songs even slower than the album. He was mainly good at making everyone feel comfortable enough to give a performance where there was some emotion and a certain vulnerability."

But stripping it back doesn't mean there isn't a grand design. Sea Change is fully formed and deliberately conceived. One listen, and it's clear that this was no two-week project, as was the case with 1998's Mutations, which Godrich also produced. "I was thinking about the sound of this record for a couple of years," says Beck. "We were trying to make one of those real California-sounding records, but also modern. I was trying to tap into a refracted image of the emotional terrain of country music." And it's a terrain we know he knows, judging by the covers he likes to do live. "But it's a bit more haunted, so it captures some of the quality of a desertscape or a vast sea. I wanted it to sound very clean, very open like nature -- that kind of end zone where you go to let everything that's built up dissipate."

Maybe that sense of crossing a finish line is why this sad record is strangely comforting. "A song is happy or sad depending on who's listening to it," Beck agrees, if for different reasons. "I can hear something that's sad to somebody, that to me is just relaxing and beautiful. That's one of the aspects of music that makes it a volatile and strange form."

Volatile and strange. Sound like a certain album with a bright green cover and a Technicolor sensibility? Beck explains, "With Midnite Vultures I was trying to write lyrics as if they'd been translated into a language and then translated back poorly. There's a lot of Japanese influence in that record -- the idea of sensory overload, being annihilated by color, imagery, and atmosphere. [Sea Change] is meant to leave a lot of room for the listener. I was trying to make one of those mellow folk records for somebody who doesn't necessarily get into that kind of thing -- sort of the way Midnite Vultures was an R&B and funk experiment for people who weren't necessarily listening to R. Kelly or Rick James."

Beck busted out some "Nicotine & Gravy" when I saw him live the other week, probably because his band lives in L.A. and was able to join him. On the previous dates of his summer tour he'd performed only with guitarist Smokey Hormel, who, along with the rest of the guys -- Justin Meldal-Johnson (bass), Roger Manning Jr. (keys), and Joey Waronker (drums) -- have formed the nucleus of Beck's sound for the past five years or so.

To unfurl a bucolic beauty like Sea Change on the heels of Midnite Vulture's dancin' shoes speaks volumes on the versatility of this group of musicians. Using a light touch to convey heavy sentiment, the new album melts in your ears, eased along by acoustic guitar, Rhodes piano, pedal steel, and string parts arranged by Beck's father, David Campbell. It's soft rock for the post-rock set, and just shy of epic.

In addition to the core players, Beck enlisted L.A. power-pop luminary Jason Falkner for lead guitar on one track and James Gadson for drums on four. Beck says of seeking out Gadson, "He's a well-known soul and R&B drummer who played on all the Bill Withers records in the early '70s. I had the idea that these acoustic, romantic songs had to have the kind of rhythmic feel -- real understated but funky -- that would add another element to it."

And Beck himself has become quite the guitar player. Take "Already Dead," on which he pristinely picks his way into the company of his beloved English folkies. He explains, "I delved into an aspect of my guitar playing and songwriting that only really surfaced a few times on Mutations and at the end of some of my other records. I've been getting more into folk playing and practicing guitar over the last couple years." And you can see it in his live performances, in which his and Hormel's parts lock like 12 strings of pure love.

As for the fall tour, Beck's band will consist of all three Flaming Lips, who will also be the opening act. "I'm a fan," Beck says. "I've met them and I like them. I like that they're a band and they're songwriters in the classic sense, but their approach to performance is really unique and kindred to the way I look at performing. They have that hardened absurdity, but their music is also genuine." And what kind of genuine absurdity can we expect? "There's no way they're gonna play it like the gentlemen on the record. I'm just gonna be open to whatever they bring. We start rehearsing this week, so most of this is just conjecture, but that's what's exciting."

As for a set list, we can count on everything from the new and earnest, to the old and slightly goofy. "I'm usually focused on what I'm doing currently, but I enjoy revisiting certain songs. There are certain joke songs from when I was younger. You know, you tell a funny joke two or three times, and then, okay, you don't need to tell it any more. So I have a bunch of those songs -- some weren't even on albums. People call out for them at shows, but they're silly. I wrote them at the time to fill out a show."

Of course, silliness still has its place. As recently as Midnite Vultures, Beck used it to shake down hip-hop idioms, his stitched-up slang whizzing by like Courvoisier ads on a Tokyo subway. And if all that stuff about JCPenney clerks and fly Hyundais sounds a bit ironic, Beck would like to differ: "People might think that I don't take what I do seriously, that there might be some insincerity. Probably one out of two people think that what I do is ironic. I think there's a fine line between irony and a sense of humor. Humor just comes from being human, relating to other humans in a way that we're all sharing a similar experience and trying to add some levity to the gravity of existence. I love people, and I would never take them for granted or disrespect them in any way. At the same time, I wouldn't surrender my humor or my realization of the absurdity of certain situations." He says Devo weren't ironic either: "I really felt like they believed it. They were amusing, but they were also subverting certain expectations of a rock band, and rocking out without that dudeness."

Back to my own vain search for cleverness, what could I have done to endear myself to Beck? "The things that are funniest to me are the things that recognize the truth in a situation -- something in the world that's a given and is taken seriously -- and find the thing-ness of it and point to it in some new way. We live in a world of arbitrariness, and humor reminds us that it's not a dream. It's perfectly normal that hair is growing out of our heads." And I show up wearing a hat.

As for the future, Beck will probably wrap up his tour and return home to watch the neighborhood gardens grow (he said that), read, catch up on movies, and go for his daily walks. It certainly won't be long before he's making music again. "I have some things I've been working on with the Dust Brothers for the last few years," he offers. "I've made a few attempts to branch into the hip-hop world, so I may do that again, although it's prohibitively expensive." He may also hook back up with Air producer Tony Hoffer.

He claims that by hip-hop standards Sea Change was relatively cheap to make, and for now he just hopes it'll knock people out -- literally. "Hopefully, people can fall asleep to this record," he says. It's a nobly tangible service -- we all need those records. Hell, I'd rather Beck compete with wave radios than try to chase The Hives and The Vines up the charts. "I don't think any of my records fit into what's going on," he says. "I'm not really attempting to make anything that's contemporary or relevant. It's not really of the present or the past or the future. I just want to write good songs, songs that people would want to hear five or six times."

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