Beck on his new album: "It was a real puzzle."

Interviewer: Hi, my name is Tomon Hurst. I've recently finished mixing Beck's new album and I'm here to have a chat with the man and ask him a few questions. Are you there, sir?
Beck: I am here.
Interviewer: Hi, how are you?
Beck: Good. How are you?
Interviewer: I'm all right, yeah. Very well.
Beck: We're over a long-distance line.
Interviewer: Long-distance line, London . . . no, not London. New York to L.A., I believe. Well, obviously I've still been listening to the master of this record which again I think Bob did such an amazing job on. And yeah, I can't stop listening to this record. Some of these songs have been around quite a while for you, haven't they? They're not sort of recent recent, but some have been around for a few years. Is there a particular reason why this record is coming out now for you?
Beck: I think there are a lot of reasons. I think I had this record of mine for years. I did try to attempt doing some of these songs about three years ago in Nashville. I tried to go there and do a kind of country-tinged record, and then recorded quite a few songs there, and that at the end of it, it wasn't quite what I was looking for. I wasn't sure what it was. I had this song, “Wave,” which is all orchestral and that had already been sitting around for a few years.
I decided to do another record that was going to be something that was a bit more . . . had beats and was more kind of an energy thing. And then some things didn't line up on that, so I pulled out some of these songs about a year ago and just started building the album around a few of these Nashville tracks and that song “Wave.”
Interviewer: Yeah, I remember the song. I mean the song, “Wave,” is obviously in a way quite important because it's literally just an orchestral arrangement you and your father did I believe, and just the vocal. So for me, within the record, it's actually sort of the center of the record in a strange way, right?
Beck: Yeah, it really is. It's the song that felt like the gravitational center and everything else had to work within that center.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: It had to orbit that center and feel like a part of it.
Interviewer: I think, along with the title of that song, particularly “Wave,” there is quite a strong element of the sea in this album isn't there? It seems to come back quite on several songs. Is there any theme there that you're exploring particularly?
Beck: You know, it's interesting because I've moved to the ocean way up in County Line and when I'd done the song “Wave,” I wasn't living anywhere near the ocean.
Interviewer: [Laughs]
Beck: But those chords came, and this idea “Wave,” and this idea that, you know, these sort of ideas that an action creates sort of responses in the world and each human life in a way has some sort of . . . you know, resonates through other lives. And that's kind of . . . I was taking these kinds of concepts and trying to throw them into that orchestral setting and trying to find something about something really basic, you know? Just to sort of . . . these basic concepts. But yeah, that's kind of where [inaudible 04:06] was coming . . .
Interviewer: Yeah. With this record, it's been several years now since your last record. At what point had you made a decision about what songs would be included on this record? Or did it evolve over a period of time?
Beck: Yeah, again, it was just kind of peeling away songs that just didn't quite fit into that feeling. I mean I had songs where the lyrics were much more kind of, I don't know, kind of funny and had some humor. Some of the songs I had were kind of a take on that kind of country Nashville tradition, you know? And they just didn't quite fit the mood, so I started building songs that fit this mood, which is not something that I've always done. I think a lot of my records, I just throw a bunch of things together and . . .
 
Interviewer: They seem to turn out. They turned out pretty well. Obviously, I know some of the history of this record, and especially the musicians that are involved in it. You know, I seem to remember talking to you about obviously sometimes it's quite hard to get a hold of some of the people, especially the drummers involved, be it Joey or Gadson himself. How much did that play a part in what songs they did and where you could do them and sort of the timescale of this record?
Beck: Yeah, it was a real puzzle because the musicians on this record, these are all people I've played with for over 20 years . . . 15 or 20 years. And at this point in our lives, everyone's so busy, there's so many other things going on.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: Joey's playing with Thom Yorke and other people and Smokey has a lot of things going on. Justin, my bass player, is producing other bands. So it was a real trick getting everyone in the room all together. It actually hadn't happened in about 12 years.
Interviewer: [Laughs] And it's . . .
Beck: Yeah, an achievement in itself.
Interviewer: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean because they are an astounding bunch of musicians, I thought.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: I mean you can just tell once they did get in a room, did the takes come pretty quick? Was it an arduous process?
Beck: It's so quick. I mean it's not even funny.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: I am always the loose end, you know? I'm the one who's trying to get it together.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: They're good from take one. But you know, we all got together originally about two years ago to play this Bridge School Benefit that Neil Young does every year. We played a few warm-up shows, and that show we played songs from Sea Change together for the first time since we'd recorded it.
Interviewer: Wow, which is what, 15 years now?
Beck: That was I think 2002, so about 12 years. But that was . . . I think that was really where the idea that this record should happen.
Interviewer: Well, sort of the aesthetic of the record if you like? The sense of it?
Beck: Yeah, and just that feeling of playing with those musicians again, you know?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: It's something that I always remembered being something special, but revisiting it was like time had stood still, and it was right there. So I spent about a year trying to figure out how to get us all together and what we could record.
Interviewer: Yeah. I mean, you mentioned Sea Change. Obviously that has come up in reference or in conversation with this record, because there is an element of . . . well, maybe not continuation, but definitely it's a development of that. I don't know, of that sound as such. What would you attribute that to? What do you call that sound? Sort of modern California.
Beck: [Laughs] I know.
Interviewer: I don't know, what is it?
Beck: I don't know. I think I could come up with some hyphenated phrase for it.
Interviewer: What genre box do you come in . . .
Beck: It could be Pacific folk rock bucolic melancholy power ballad. I don't know.
Interviewer: Love it. Sounds great. So in making this record, obviously you're known, and having got to know you mixing this weapon, you're super- involved on the production side and the engineering side and you care greatly about sonic fidelity if you like. Where did you do the recording for this record and what influenced that apart from just being able to get these musicians together in a room?
Beck: Well, the first song I did actually in the Capital Records building, down in the basement studio there. And I've done most of the strings for all my records there. It's a particularly good room for recording strings.
Interviewer: Is that the Nat King Cole room or the Sinatra room? Which one did they . . .
Beck: I believe it's the Sinatra room, but you know, it's actually a studio that can be . . . all the studios can be opened up together. So when they used to have these huge orchestras, 70-piece orchestras, they would open them up. The wall actually opens up. But there's a particular sound there. And the sound chamber's below the building, which they were going to tear out a few years ago. There's something that you can't . . . that's not something you can recreate in a computer. You have to have those particular chambers that were built in the 50s.
Interviewer: They're less pool designed aren't they?
Beck: Yeah, and there's a sonic space to them. There's a character that, as you know, the many computer recreations of that, there's nothing that really compares.
Interviewer: No.
Beck: And they were made for strings and orchestra, those chambers. So that's where it started. And then I had that song and I actually originally was trying to give it to some other singers I was working with. And then I went to Nashville a few years later, about three years after that, and did a bunch of sessions. I had all kinds of musicians coming and whoever was around that day, people I'd never played with, that's where about three of the songs . . .  I think “Say Goodbye,” “Blackbird Chain” and “Waking Light” were all from those sessions. And then I put that to bed for a while. I just felt like well, it was an experiment and I'm not sure it really worked.
Interviewer: Because of the songs, if I'm right in asking, were re-recorded several times aren't they? Was that a production decision or, again, musician availability?
Beck: Yeah, I did take some of those Nashville songs and we re-recorded parts of them and I kept certain parts, so there's sort of a Frankenstein recording. They're pieced together from various places. But you know, I put together that kind of . . . I put that kind of record aside for a while because I just felt like it got to a point where it's been so long since I put out another record that I thought I should come out with something that was not quite as quiet or introspective. Something that had a bit more to it, you know? It had all kinds of songs.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: But then it just fell together about a year ago, getting everybody together. So I thought why not? Let's do it, and we'll just do it quickly. But it ended up taking about four or five months, so it was a bit of a process.
Interviewer: Yeah. I mean just knowing this record quite well and at the multi-track level, the vocal production in itself is impressive. Also you're doing all the backing vocals yourself on most of the record. Has your production method work, has it changed over the years? Did you feel anything new came to you making this record? Or have you always been sort of very serious about that side of it?
Beck: I don't think a lot's changed. I think I've always been a bit into that side of things. I've always . . . even working with producers, I'm always there when we're mixing. We go through everything, and a lot of the decisions, how we're going to record things, where we're going to do it, who's going to play . . . I've always been involved or helping spearhead all that stuff.
I've always . . . I have to say, I've always envied artists who can just kind of show up and get somebody to write them a song them just come in and they sing it and then leave and let somebody take care of all that. I just think they must have incredibly civilized lives, very well-rested, because as you know it's an all day and night kind of madness trying to get the sounds onto tape or into the computer. So I've definitely succumbed to that with a lot of these records.
Interviewer: Well, I mean I've mixed a few records in my time, and you've made quite a few records. Mixing this record, from my end, it was just a sonic joy from start to finish.
Beck: Well, that's great to hear.
Interviewer: Yeah, well considering the musicians you had, the studios you had available, and some very good engineers. I think Drew and Daryl were heavily involved. It is sort of a masterpiece of sound, I think, as well as being very rich in song. From what I can remember, all your records have sort of had this sonic purity that many artists don't achieve. Do you find that hard? When did that start? I think of . . . sorry.
Beck: Yeah, no, I think we're all, myself and people who play in my band and the engineers who worked on this record, we're all kind of students of studios and the history of recording. And so many of my friends, we've spent a lot of our adult life chasing down rare gear and trying to find certain sounds. Because as you know, through the 80s and into the 90s, things became a bit more digital and computer-based and a lot of the techniques of recording were starting to get lost or obscured or just left behind.
So I'm sure you're of the same generation, trying to rediscover a lot of this before it's lost. You know, some of this . . . while we were recording this record, there was a mastering engineer down at Ocean Way down in Hollywood. He was working on preserving these Frank Sinatra master tapes that were recorded in the late 50s.
Interviewer: Are these quarter-inches or three-track quarter-inches?
Beck: They were three-track, and they just sounded so much larger than life. And you go to the CDs or the records, and I don't know what tapes they're using or what mixes, but when you actually get to the original recording, these are state of the art. They sound more rich and three-dimensional and alive and powerful than most things recorded now. So yeah.
Interviewer: I remember the first time I came and met you. Well, not the first time, but I did come see you at your house in Malibu. About a minute after meeting your family, you dragged me off to play me quarter-inches versus iTunes releases of songs.
Beck: [Laughs]
Interviewer: That went on for a few hours, but it was staggering. So I completely understood, having started in the tape world and sort of watching computers dominate recording now.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: You know, the sound that you're trying to get, it's not that it's made harder by computers, but you definitely have to work a bit harder.
Beck: Yeah, and we're still in a transition phase, you know? I think we're . . . you know, there was a tradeoff going digital, absolutely economically. It's so much more accessible and fast, but there is something sacrificed. I think another part of the background of this record is I did spend a few years getting heavily into recording equipment and a lot of one of a kind, lost, forgotten pieces of equipment that I or other people have had rebuilt.
Just a lot of time, probably a year or two spent just learning about all these old pieces of equipment, because the studio where we did, Ocean Way, it had this old control room that had all the equipment that had been there for 40 years or so. And so I did most of my recording there. There was no need to collect any equipment because there was nothing better than they had there. And they ripped that room out, as you know, a few years ago and put in some more . . . they put a Neve [SP] board in there. So you know, it's the modern standard thing. But it didn't have quite this sound, you know, that I'd grown used to.
Interviewer: Yeah, I mean that's the thing. There's a nostalgia to certain consoles, if you like, and studio spaces. Most of the time, always trying to maybe not replicate a room, but there's definitely a sound that a live room gives. And this record, that's such a strong part of it whether it's the drum tracks or what have you.
There's definitely a sense of performance in these songs, and people playing in the room together which let's be honest, doesn't happen a lot anymore. How much did that influence the making of this record? The fact that you chose certain rooms for certain sounds? And which songs? Was there a batch? You talked about the Nashville trio of songs.
Beck: Yeah, we went back and recut some of it and fixed up some of the Nashville recordings, and then we cut a bunch of new things back at Ocean Way where we did Sea Change. So that was really interesting because there is a sound. There's a feeling in that room. I've had a lot of other bands go there and they said "I don't know, we went there and we didn't quite find it." But it really is there. So a lot of the body of this record is the sound of us all playing in the room together.
Interviewer: Yeah, because it does influence the sound, doesn't it? It does probably influence the performance side.
Beck: It really does. It really does. And the album I did before, I ended up doing most of it myself with Danger Mouse with Brian Burton. That was just multitracking myself for most of that record, so it really is . . . it's something I have to always get back to that, get playing in a room with the band. It kind of really is . . . things happen. I mean things you often don't intend, as you know . . .
Interviewer: Well, happy accidents I call them sometimes.
Beck: Yeah, and that's what I'm always looking for, you know? Always looking for those things that you couldn't have conceived or you couldn't have prepared for.
Interviewer: Why don't we talk about the actual songs themselves a little bit on this record? You talked about “Waves” being something that sort of started the record, and for me it was a kind of theme for the record. How did that develop across the album? And do you have a particular favorite on the record? Is there anything else that once you got it, it felt like this is the way to go from here on?
Beck: Well, yeah, I had recorded a lot of things over the whole couple of years from Nashville to doing demos at my house. You know, so I think I started to pull apart all of the songs that weren't quite working, and I really tried to find a mood and then kept rewriting and rewriting until the songs became more of this sort of idea, whatever that was, this abstract idea that I was fumbling towards.
Interviewer: What's this? The bucolic melancholy, is it?
Beck: Yeah, I think it's kind of . . . with certain recordings, there's a kind of mood or energy or spell. As you're working on the song, you can easily disrupt that or lose it.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: You know, there's so many times you've put on a song and you're right in it, and then a guitar part or the vocal comes in and it's just not right and then it breaks the spell. Or something is perfect and it's a complete thing. So that's what I was really working towards. So the moments that worked like that, something like “Say Goodbye,” which was a live performance and that's something we did on the last night in Nashville. That was kind of the exhaust of two weeks of struggling and fumbling, then that thing just happened in one take. And as you hear it . . .
Interviewer: Sure. I mean yeah, over this record as a whole, tempo-wise slow is probably the wrong word but there's a fragility to these recordings and to the production. I mean obviously with the caliber of musicians you had, that came together pretty quickly, but was there anything that sort of set the pace for that? Or how did that come about?
Beck: You know, it's funny you say that because I remember sitting in the studio playing these songs and looking around the room as we were playing them and learning them.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: You know, one of us would say, "Should we do this slower?" Kind of conspiratorially. And we'd do it slow. We'd do it impossibly slow. One of us would say, "Let's try it even slower." We just kept slowing it down until it was barely playable. I mean there are certain tempos that are impossible to play, so then you have drummers like Joey or James Gadson who is a legend who can keep the song moving and still keep it musical and compelling at such a slow tempo.
But there's something, when you slow that down, that's something I think we stumbled on on “Sea Change.” You had some songs that were very simple kinds of country/folk/rock kinds of thing, but when you slowed them down they became something else.
Interviewer: Yeah, there's almost a spiritual sort of . . . I don't know what you call it, awake feel to them. They become quite hypnotic don't they?
Beck: Yeah, and when I was younger, in the 90s, we'd listen to a lot of Eno and ambient stuff, the Aphex Twins, Stars of the Lid, that kind of stuff. And when Sigur Ros came out, it was very . . . they're kind of a rock version of that.
Interviewer: Absolutely.
Beck: Taking this idea of this rock, and when they slow it down to this pace it becomes something else. Anyway . . .
Interviewer: Why don't we talk about the songs in particular a little bit? If I just sort of go through the songs, maybe you can just tell us a little bit about each of them?
Beck: Okay.
Interviewer: So “Cycle?”
Beck: Well, we did all these instrumental fragments with the orchestra after we were done doing a day of tracking all the orchestral parts. So that was one of the fragments, just after sequencing the record, we started throwing little pieces of it in. It was really a last-minute thing. I think I sent it to you . . .
Interviewer: Absolutely, yeah.
Beck: We had about four or five of them, and we picked two. I think we originally had more on the record. I think we got rid of a few of them, these little fragments. But I had this idea of these little orchestral transitions, and . . . at the end of it, the songs on the record were so slow, the record was getting fairly long. So it was a trick.
Interviewer: It was.
Beck: To try to add more in there.
Interviewer: I remember having a couple conversations about that, yeah.
Beck: Yeah, but I think it was important to have these kind of . . . something the orchestra does, the simplicity of those short pieces, were really necessary.
Interviewer: Yeah, they bookend the record in a weird way and they also to me bring it back to the song “Wave,” which again we talked about being sort of at the center of this album thematically.
Beck: Yeah, I think it's a way of thinking about the record as one piece, as opposed to a collection of just a bunch of songs on a CD. Then you do have Wave which kind of stands out on its own in the middle of the record. So these other pieces, I think you're right. I think they help. They introduce and anchor it somewhere.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: It's probably some sort of foreshadowing. It's some kind of . . .
Interviewer: Yeah, it's like a, what do you call it, repeat or . . . yeah. And the song “Morning,” which sort of starts the record if you like?
Beck: Yeah, that was something that I just improvised in the studio. It was all of us back in the room together. I had this guitar from 1940, a really special guitar, that I bought after my first or second record. It was my dream guitar and I played it all on Sea Change.
Interviewer: What is it? What is the guitar?
Beck: It's a D28 pre-war, and it's a guitar that you hear on a lot of those 60s and early 70s singer-songwriter records. Pretty much all of those artists played one of these guitars. It's kind of the . . . it has a sound that really speaks and has a lot of life and it's just character.
So I haven't been able to play this guitar in years, so sitting in that room with that guitar and the musicians, I just strummed those chords real quickly and they all sort of fell in. We just turned it into a song really quickly. So that song wasn't really intended for the record. It wasn't something I'd written for it at all, but it felt like the moment of all of us together again. And in that place, where we spent so much time in our 20s learning about how to make records . . . some of my favorite memories in that studio.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: So it was a moment, you know? So I think that's what that song is.
Interviewer: Lyrically, I mean Morning, the idea of a new start and so on, does that feature? We're also going back to talking about this is your first record in some time. Does that feature lyrically? Even if you're unaware.
Beck: I think it really did, and I was grappling with what some of these songs on the record were. I got this idea of when you're coming through a period of time, you're coming through something, as life does it gives you those periods where the pendulum sort of swings into the darkness a bit. It might not seem like it, but eventually, it does come back. This really felt like a moment where things are coming back in a lot of ways.
Interviewer: From my end, mixing this record and knowing your material really well, there's an aspirational sort of thought behind this album as well. It's upbeat, I think, even though tempo-wise it may be slow. But there is a sort of aspirational message, I think, in some of this. Was that conscious for you, having not put something out for a while, that lyrically shaped this record?
Beck: Yeah, it was conscious and I was trying to . . . you know, there are certain songs that do dwell on these certain aspects, things that are heartbreaking and things that are . . . you know, that's what you do in songs. You're really parsing through all this whatever negative experience and sifting through it and making sense of it. Certain songs can be cathartic that way, but I really did try to think about some aspect of it that could be hopeful in a way, which I think is a really hard thing to embody in a song. I think artists that come out of gospel music do it really well, or artists who are kind of trying to summon that kind of feeling. They're drawing on a kind of gospel source.
Interviewer: Hope, faith and things like that?
Beck: Yeah, which are . . . yeah, which are difficult to find. So I was trying to put some of that in there, that there is a way to come through these things and that things can get better or that . . .
Interviewer: Yeah. One thing that I've . . .
Beck: And you know, you go through those moments where you feel like things are tarnished and cynicism can set in.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: So to find yourself in a place where you can actually . . . you know what?
Interviewer: You can do it, yeah.
Beck: You can go through those things and it can be good again, somehow.
Interviewer: [Laughs] The only thing I know is the word isolation appears in “Waves,” but there is a feeling of being maybe not sort of invisible in this world, but you found your place in recording all this a while back. How old were you when your first record came out? You were 19, right?
Beck: No, a little bit . . . I was 22, I think. 21 or 22. But I'd done the first recordings. “Loser” I'd done when I was 20, I was quite young, and that song ended up sitting around for a couple years. So yeah, early 20s. Fairly young.
Interviewer: Is that something you think about? Your place, where you fit in the recording world as an artist? Does it bother you? Does it influence anything you do when you write? To me . . .
Beck: Yeah, all of the above and not at all. I've had periods where it was just a free-for-all. You know, just let whatever comes out come out and put it out without any kind of thought of repercussion at all. And then I've had other periods . . . you know, I had a lot of time between this record and the last one where I thought "What is all this? What are all these records? What are we trying to do here?" And you know, as you get perspective you can see which songs are still listenable or have some sort of relevance or which ones have time been kind to?
Interviewer: Yeah, definitely from my end it's nice. You make albums then you put a few 12-inches, but they're very much collections of songs reflecting a period of time in your life and so on. Let's carry on with songs. "Heart is a Drum," can you tell us a bit about that one? Definitely one of the more upbeat songs on the record.
Beck: Yeah, that one was very . . . you know, that's something that I thought about for years, trying to write a song like that. And all these songs, there's a simplicity to the lyrics for the most part, a directness, that I find difficult. My tendency is to kind of play with language and imagery and those kinds of things, and maybe obscure the sentiment slightly or couch it in language that is a little more open-ended. I'm just drawn to that. It's where I go. So to be concise and say something very direct, and something that could be possibly maybe sentimental or banal?
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: It can be scary. I feel like there's a lot of pitfalls there.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: This is a song I was kind of . . . the way I got around it is I just went right to what I was feeling, exactly. I tried to get as close. I think that's what you have to do when you're trying to come from that place.
Interviewer: Sure. I mean it's also that thing of leaving the best books, the best records, in my mind. I don't always love them first listen. They take some evolving as a listener. If it's all spelt out from the beginning . . . and I definitely feel that with this . . .
Beck: That's true. I mean it's really true.
Interviewer: You know what I mean? And they end up being my favorite records, but at the beginning I struggle with them. Then months and months in, you start. And there's a lot of that on this record, because it is, production-wise, I think you've excelled yourself on this. It's dense and it's very ambitious.
Beck: Well, I have to thank you for helping sort through a lot of it, because there was a lot going on on some of these songs. I feel like you helped focus and bring a clarity to what was happening sonically. I mean some of the songs had many, many overdubs of me doing ambient noise over the whole song, and I think some of it's still there, but you just brought the vocals up and the basic aspects of it to really speak. I think that's . . .
Interviewer: I don't know if that makes us old, Beck. I think we are the same age, but I still very much like the thought of an artist having a career making albums. It's what I grew up on. There's a longevity to that that commonly is now ever-present nowadays. The pressure on a new artist to put a record out and sell is immense.
Beck: Yeah, I always . . . I get that feeling in my stomach, that kind of excitement, when I think of those kinds of times where an artist was putting out an album twice a year. And it's weird records. There's ones that didn't quite make sense at the time, and later something about them was revealed. And like you were saying before as well, you forget as you get older but you're right. When I was younger, some of my favorite records, they were really strange and I wasn't sure what to think about them and maybe even recoiled from them, whether it's Nick Trick or the Velvet Underground or Kraftwerk. Well, Kraftwerk when I first heard it, I completely fell in love.
Interviewer: Yeah, that freaked everyone out.
Beck: But you know what I mean?
Interviewer: Did you also get those moments when . . . you know, I remember buying say Blonde on Blonde. I think it was the first Dylan album I bought. And that wonderful feeling when you're young, but you realize an artist has got like ten albums before that?
Beck: Oh, yeah.
Interviewer: And you just get to go discover . . . that's kind of gone for me.
Beck: That feeling, yeah. There's a world that you can explore.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: Yeah, it really is now kind of an arms race of a song, a single song, a single kind of song that's going to go through the world and blow through walls. Those songs are necessary, I think. Those are really part of the culture. They're something we want and need. But I do like the idea of this body of work that somebody can build and just exists, and when you discover an artist whether it's John Martyn or Stevie Wonder or the Smiths or . . .
Interviewer: Yeah, you've got this whole history. I remember coming to the Prospect Park shows in Brooklyn that you played this summer and hearing basically the last 20 years of your recording career in the space of an hour. You know what I mean? And it's fantastically diverse and sonically diverse. You have explored a few genres, really.
Beck: Sort of musical whiplash is what it is.
Interviewer: Let's get back to songs. I think the next one's “Say Goodbye.” Can you tell us a bit about that one?
Beck: Yeah, that was . . . I think we . . . oh yeah, that was . . .
Interviewer: Is that Gadson on “Say Goodbye?”
Beck: Yeah, Gadson played drums. It was tracked in Nashville. There's an Ocean Way in Nashville as well at an old church, and we did one night there. That song, I had a stack of songs and lyrics and I was flipping through them, just going through all the songs with the musicians, seeing if something worked. That particular sheet of lyrics, I couldn't remember the chords of the music or the melody so we just started improvising something.
Interviewer: Right.
Beck: And that song, it's basically they fell in with the chords and that's the recording on the record. I think that's why I like that, because you're hearing the song . .
Interviewer: It's an immediacy.
Beck: You're hearing the song being thought up and played tenuously, and it somehow worked.
Interviewer: I think so.
Beck: Yeah. And we tried to re-record it later, but it just didn't have the same mood, that tenuousness.
Interviewer: It's also got . . . it's not a more aggressive drum track, but it's definitely got a bit more of a head-nod factor to it in that sense, definitely.
Beck: Well Gadson, for people who don't know, he's a legendary drummer. He's played on . . .
Interviewer: He played for Bill Withers?
Beck: Bill Withers. He's been on so many records that were sampled that are classic breakbeat records, but he's “I Will Survive” . . .
Interviewer: Right. How old is he?
Beck: I actually don't know. I think he's in his 70s.
Interviewer: Right.
Beck: He is just a beautiful soul, just one of a kind.
Interviewer: Am I right? I seem to remember you telling me a story about him coming to one of the sessions for this record and he sadly being unwell. He'd been in the hospital and he still had a hospital tag on his wrist.
Beck: Yeah, we were recording. He'd been working all day. I looked down and he had his hospital tags on. I said "What's going on?" He said "Oh, I came from the hospital." I felt terrible. He said "I wouldn't miss it."
Interviewer: I bet you made him do another take anyway. [Laughs]
Beck: Get back in there. Yeah, no, he's a soldier.
Interviewer: He really is, isn't he? And you don't often get characters like that. You can actually hear the character of him on his drum track. It's just something else.
Beck: I've talked to other drummers about what he does with a kick drum, and there's nobody who does what he does with a kick drum. It's some sorcery.
Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's a part. It's not just a rhythm track, is it? It's an actual part that influences the whole sound.
Beck: It's a breathing or something. It's a kind of . . . it's physical. When you're playing with him, you feel . . . musically, you feel like you're being embraced.
Interviewer: Yeah, it's like a root. It's like a big old tree, isn't it?
Beck: Yeah. You're just floating in it. It's really unusual.
Interviewer: And again, it must give everyone else such confidence knowing you've got this sort of backbone of this really solid drummer. Okay, so “Blue Moon.” Sorry.
Beck: No, no, no. “Blue Moon” was a demo actually. That song was kind of the odd song out on the record. It's a demo I'd done by myself at my house, and I'd completely forgotten about it. After we recorded all the songs on the record, I stumbled onto it in the studio. I said "What is this?" It was something I'd just done in a night and never listened to it and played it for my manager who said put it on the record. So that was kind of . . .
Interviewer: It'd been around a while, that one?
Beck: Yeah, and it just fit so why not?
Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely.
Beck: And it was a little bit more up. It had something that the rest of the record didn't have, a kind of . . .
Interviewer: Yeah, it's got a breeziness to it. It skips along.
Beck: Exactly.
Interviewer: Yeah. I suppose the next one . . .
Beck: You know, actually, something else about that song we could talk about briefly, because we were talking a bit about Elvis when we were mixing.
Interviewer: Yes, we were. Yes, we were.
Beck: I had read, before I did that song, I read these Elvis bibliographies that Peter Guralnick wrote years ago.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: I gave you a copy. So that song, obviously it's a reference to the cover of Blue Moon that Presley did when he was 19 or something, right at the beginning of his career. One of the first things he ever recorded.
Interviewer: Astounding recording.
Beck: Yeah, and it's so–talk about simple, and it's just this distillation of the haunted quality of what he was doing musically. There's a haunted quality of youth, something . . . he captured musically this sort of thing that you see in James Dean performances. That sort of lonesome night of the teenage soul. And then at the end of the book, it goes into incredible detail on Elvis in Vegas at the end of his life.
Interviewer: Sure, sure.
Beck: Sequestered up in his hotel room in Vegas. He's been through the whole thing and he's sitting there isolated. I think when I read the book, I was about the same age. It was just I was kind of thinking about that “Blue Moon” song, and maybe he's in Vegas looking out, and he has all his spiritual books that he's reading and he sees the moon coming up. If there was something of that, that younger version of himself there and that kind of longing for that . . .
Interviewer: Yeah, and the simplicity also. If you think about those recordings, how they were made, I mentioned that would've been straight to mono, right? Live in the studio.
Beck: Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's him and a guitar and a bass.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: Like the early Elvis, he didn't even have a drummer. There were no drums. And he had people moving and dancing.
Interviewer: Yeah. Okay, “Unforgiven,” which definitely features a Gadson master-class drum track, but what's “Unforgiven?” Where does that sit?
Beck: I think that's the song I think about when I think about Gadson. You're playing with him, and you just feel like what he's doing is just embracing you. You're just sitting in this. I remember we were recording that and that was one of the ones that just kept going slower and slower. And it was so simple and heavy, and then I asked him to not play the high hat at one point, which is really difficult at that tempo. But somehow the high hat was kind of taking away from the otherworldliness of what was happening.
So it was just piano, bass and drums. And my bass player was . . . we were all looking at each other, and the beat was so heavy and so hypnotic, he was screaming as if we were recording a song for a Slayer record or something. He was making these grimaces and throwing his head around, like just in this sort of amazement of what James was doing on the drums. Just how mean and . . .
Interviewer: There's so much conviction behind that, you know?
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: It pegs that whole song.
Beck: Yeah, so when we were tracking it, we were just reveling in it, you know?
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: And James is just doing his thing, you know?
Interviewer: Totally oblivious to what . . . yeah.
Beck: Then I did that vocal live right there, which was not a great performance, but it just kind of captured the moment I think.
Interviewer: Talking about vocals, Beck, I noticed it definitely and other people have commented on it that there's a confidence to your vocal performances on this record that, I mean not to say that other albums have lacked it, but there seems to be a new confidence. It goes back to what I was talking about earlier about part of this record, to me, it is aspirational. It's hopeful. Where did that come from, or is that something you're conscious of?
Beck: Well, I think a lot of the older records, the vocal was an afterthought.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: I think I came up in a time where songs that were too melodic or had too much of a performance, it was kind of . . . things needed to be a little bit rougher, and you didn't really work on them much. You had to underplay it. And I always had songs that had melody, but I was I think on the earlier records trying to find ways to kind of make that less noticeable. So I'd just sing it on a cheap Radio Shack mic or . . .
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: You know, you just sing out of tune a bit. I think I was also influenced by all these records I grew up with, whether it was Dylan or Tom Waits or . . . you know, that had these imperfections.
Interviewer: Which is what makes them human, and to me, understandable.
Beck: Yeah. But you know, I have a lower voice and I think when I'm singing, it suits more . . . it's almost . . . I hate to say it's more of coming out of a different kind of singing tradition maybe. You know, I think of Bing Crosby and . . .
Interviewer: The Crooners?
Beck: The Crooners, yeah, which I think of Bowie and Bryan Ferry and people like that coming out of that, although they have different voices that they use. So that was something I was thinking about on this record was using that kind of voice. Not straight Crooner, but that kind of voice that feels planted into the song.
Interviewer: Yeah. Yeah, that works. I mean obviously you've been producing records as well the last few years. Did that influence sort of how this record got made at all? I know you worked with Thurston and Charlotte Gainsbourg and Steven Martin [SP]. I mean obviously production sound is hugely important to you, but did that help you make this record in a way? Or did it shape anything?
Beck: I'm sure it did. Yeah, I think it had to have because when you're making your own record and you're in there and you're singing and you're thinking about the songwriting and everything, it's hard. It's hard to have perspective.
Interviewer: Absolutely.
Beck: I think . . . and also, as you make records, I think you start to get a little bit more I hate to say ruthless, but maybe bloody-minded. You're not as precious about each thing. "Well, we did this and I like . . ." You get a little bit more is it really working?
Interviewer: Is it good enough? Yeah.
Beck: Yeah, is this . . . so I think there's getting . . . you know, working with other people and watching them work, you do get a different perspective.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: I think I was able to access that a bit, although really I think the record would've taken a lot less time had I had a producer on the other side of the glass saying "Nope." Because I would have to do all the work on a song. I'd maybe do all the vocals, then come in and ‘No, it's not working at all,’ or ‘The lyrics are not good,’ so I had to start over. So it helpful.
Interviewer: That's not easy.
Beck: It is helpful having somebody tell you when it's right and when it isn't. It saves time.
Interviewer: Yeah, sure. I've worked with a few people, but I must admit you sort of pushed the bar for me in a sonic sense in terms of hearing things that not everyone hears. You know, that's pretty ambitious and also puts quite a lot of pressure on yourself as an artist, right? If you're having to think about songs, structures, arrangements or instrumentation, then actually be an intelligent judge of your own performance. It's not for everyone, is it?
Beck: No, I wouldn't recommend it. [Laughs] Yeah, no, that's the trick of it. And also you can also be your worst enemy because you can get in there and think the things that you're doing well actually aren't the things that are all that interesting.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: The things that are the character you might perceive as the flaws or the weaknesses. So there's a bit of that dance as well.
Interviewer: Do you have . . . I definitely have a feeling when I sit down to mix a song that I know what I want it to sound like; I actually can hear it. Then I actually have to do it. Was that similar for you?
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah, once these songs are written and all . . .
Beck: You hear it, and then how do I actualize it? How do we materialize this? How do we get this to manifest? And once you've . . . yeah, once you do it . . . I don't know if you ever do it. You try to get as close as you can is what happens.
Interviewer: I think you're right.
Beck: You abandon it.
Interviewer: Otherwise we'd stop, yeah.
Beck: But there was. We pushed a lot on it, I think. We definitely pushed.
Interviewer: Right. Okay, so I think the next song is “Wave.” That should definitely be talked about, because I know obviously it's one of the most beautiful string arrangements. Did you work with your father on that? How did that actually come about, that song?
Beck: I did. I played him the song. The way it usually works is like with that particular song, I had particular voicing that I wanted. Then there's top lines of the strings that I'll usually play on a keyboard.
Interviewer: Right.
Beck: And I'll sing as well, like sometimes I'll take the third part. I'll just sing it into a recorder, and then he'll transcribe and we'll sculpt it. When we get in with the orchestra, certain things aren't working, dynamics and all that.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: It's a real process, because it's a beast working with orchestras.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: Wildly expensive and . . .
Interviewer: Things can go horribly wrong.
Beck: Horribly wrong. You have two hours, and it's really . . . it is kind of the ultimate in recording. But that one came out fairly easy.
Interviewer: I think that one's phenomenal. And to me, the idea of wave, motion and isolation, lyrically it does sort of cover the whole album doesn't it?
Beck: It really does. And again, this album wasn't conceived when we did that, but I think the album kind of grew around it.
Interviewer: Do you sometimes get a sense of an artist sort of looking in at the rest of the world, going what the hell is going on? Because that's kind of what I took from the lyrics a little bit.
Beck: Yeah, you know, I had these injuries for a lot of years and I was really sidelined for long periods of time. So that, I think that song really represents that perspective. It does shift, you know? I don't think people have that experience until later in life when they start to have serious physical problems where life really does sit you down and say "Okay, stop," and you're left more as an observer of what's happening as well as your own life and your past and everything.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: So I think that played into the mood of the record, I think.
Interviewer: “Don't Let it Go,” where did that song come from and what does it mean to you? It's one of the sort of sadder ones on the record.
Beck: Yeah. It is. It is kind of just . . . to me, it feels like one of those where you're just sitting with a friend. You're just, you know, telling it how it is. That was a song that I just . . . again, it was one of those kind of spontaneous ones. A lot of the songs I sat and spent a lot of time writing I didn't actually end up using on the record, and this is one that I just did as a demo then I re-recorded it with the band. I think I used it because it fits in with “Say Goodbye” and maybe “Morning” as well.
Interviewer: Yeah, I agree. Yeah. There's a slight ghostliness to it, “Don't Let it Go,” though. That's definitely got that energy.
Beck: Yeah, and it is. I think it has a feeling of songs on Sea Change, but maybe more of a hopefulness, like trying to preserve something and persevere and those kinds of things.
Interviewer: Sure. Sort of a sense of not regretting too much, yeah.
Beck: But it is a live performance. That one we actually recorded at my house with Joey, my drummer, in the closet. We locked him in a little closet.
Interviewer: On the [MI]?
Beck: We did that on the Del-con board which I'd just got, so we christened it, christened that board.
Interviewer: Right. And I think “Blackbird Chain” is the final song. Where did . . .
Beck: That's one of the ones I did in Nashville. We'd recorded all these songs. Some of them were almost kind of, you know, just straight old- fashioned Nashville kind of songs. They were very straight. There's a sort of formula. There is a particular kind of template for those kinds of songs.
Interviewer: A format, yeah.
Beck: Think Hank Williams, George Jones, Conway Twitty. That whole era of Nashville was influential to me for years, so I always had this idea. I guess it's a bit of a self-indulgence, the idea of going to Nashville and doing some country songs. It's just to sort of fulfill some kind of 18 to 19-year-old daydream. So we'd been recording all these songs, and after a while they're all kind of similar.
So that was one that I just wrote one of the days after we'd been in there for a week or two where I wanted to break up the structure and take the idea of a country song and break up the tempos and the time signatures and have these really separate sections and these moments. I think ultimately where you end up is kind of early 70s folk, late 60s folk rock, you know? That's essentially what all those bands were doing. They were kind of trying to mess with that formula.
Interviewer: I think also, this song particularly, it's a big vocal production. And actually, when you think about it, it features on quite a lot of this record. There's a lot more vocal. You're working a lot more vocally in terms of backing vocals and so on. Was that conscious, or was that something that just came trying to get this gospel tinge to it?
Beck: Yeah. No, I think it's something I've always been attracted to. I just . . . maybe it felt a little too much on earlier records. But maybe I'm now at a point where why not? All these records I love have all these vocals. And I think also it comes down to the voice. There's something you can do with a voice. There's so much music out there that pretty much anybody can get a hold of a laptop and some people can do really special things with it, with electronic music and looping things up and using all the programs.
But a lot of people are really good at that, but there's something with a voice, that's kind of the last . . . that's the last place where you can't really replace it. I mean you can auto tune a voice, obviously.
Interviewer: No, but I get you. It's the last pure instrument, isn't it? It's the last sort of natural form, and it's what we all recognize.
Beck: So yeah, it's something I've spent a lot of time with on this record. I thought instead of putting . . . you know, obviously when you hear the record, it eschews a lot of the current recording style, a lot of the ways of putting tracks together, a lot of the sounds that are in current records. It's very easy. We could've easily taken all these songs, and maybe the record would've been better being a more contemporary-sounding record, but I thought instead of getting into all of that and that kind of production, I'll just spend most of the time on the vocals. So this song, I think, exemplifies that.
Interviewer: I almost disagree with you and say that I think because of the way you have made this record, and some of your past records, they will last longer for it. They're not all the time. They're not sort of . . . I mean they do hark to a sort of early 70s, early California sound, but the production will not date in a way that say a record made on a particular computer program that's come out this year which everyone uses.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: The craft of the song is still very important to you, right?
Beck: But it is something I think about a lot, and I think that's probably why I held off on doing a record like this for so long, because I don't want to willfully ignore what's happening in the culture, and the way things are moving. I want to engage with it. I don't want to say it's all terrible. Some of it's good.
And even some of the stuff we think is terrible now, I know for a fact in 20 years, 25, we'll go, "That was actually really good. I like that idea. That was something happening in 2014. Oh, it's that 2014 sound." So I did worry doing this record that I wasn't engaging in the present enough, but I ultimately . . .
Interviewer: Is there a sense, throughout your career, that you've sort of not fitted in in some ways but have very much?
Beck: Yeah, I mean I think it's a tricky thing because I don't want to be . . . oh, the sound just went out. Are the levels okay? Okay. You know, I think I've been drawn to a lot of the sounds of earlier eras. I mean I think I just like the way they're recorded. It's an aesthetic, but people hearing it just think oh, that's real 70s or that's real 60s. So you are in danger of marginalizing your music, even though maybe the songwriting could exist in the current contemporary music world.
Interviewer: Yeah, just nostalgia. Yeah.
Beck: Nostalgia, yeah, it's really tricky.
Interviewer: Do you remember that phase when people used to put the sound of vinyl on tracks?
Beck: I did it. I did it.
Interviewer: I remember getting . . .
Beck: But you know, it was more of a statement of, "Whoa, CDs are really taking over. Here's the sound of vinyl just so we remember it."
Interviewer: But it does something. It triggers a nostalgic sort of emotion in someone, because growing up, I remember that feeling of a needle dropping on a record.
Beck: You and I and people I grew up with, none of us knew what music sounded like without vinyl crackle.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: I mean the CD era was a huge kind of sonic shock because we had no reference. We only knew music . . . I mean I guess we had cassette tapes and that has a particular sound, but for the most part, that was part of the sound. Once you lose some of that sound, some of that sort of sonic patina, that degradation, suddenly there's an emotion that's missing.
You know, I got an old wind-up Victrola years ago and it came with an early Frank Sinatra 78, probably from the 40s or early 50s. And I've since listened to that song on CD, and it just does not do the same thing. There's just something, again, that kind of otherness of hearing it in that setting. But what can we do? It is so convenient having this music on . . .
Interviewer: Formats, yeah.
Beck: Yeah, digital. But there will be time to make other music that engages in current sounds, but it is something that I grapple with.
Interviewer: So this record now as a whole, it's three years sort of on and off in the making. Are you happy with the outcome?
Beck: I think I am, yeah. I think there were points where I was worried that it was too quiet, it was too one thing, but I don't know. I felt encouraged. Over the years, I've had many, many people come say to me they like Sea Change and that's an album that crops up. For a long time, I avoided making anything that sounded like that record. And after a long time, I felt like why not? That's a sound that I probably spent 15 years getting towards. I can play you dozens and dozens of recordings that were never released where I was trying to do something that felt like that record, so why not go back there and see what else is there?
Interviewer: Is there an element in your mind, I mean from my perspective looking at your career, that this is sort of a chapter to your moment? The beginning of something else that carries on?
Beck: Yeah, or filling out a picture because when I would go out and play shows, I've gone and played acoustic shows. I can play a few Sea Change songs. There needs to be more there, and that's something I've been feeling a lot the last few years.
There's the chapter analogy. There's a lot of missing parts to the whole thing. That's what you realize when you go to play live. I mean there are artists who did 20 records by the time they're 30, so they can go play a concert and there's a whole story there. There's a whole trajectory. But I really feel like I'm still working on that. I have to . . .
Interviewer: In progress, yeah.
Beck: It's in progress, yeah. Absolutely.
Interviewer: And the song “Turn Away” as well, which I think is fantastic, how did that come about? Because it feels like a continuation of the sort of acoustic part of you. Again, no drum track on that one. Can you tell us a bit about “Turn Away?”
Beck: Yeah, that was one that I did towards the end. We had all these songs that had a lot of lush, orchestral . . . there was a lot of density happening, and I felt really strongly that I wanted to do something that was just voice and guitar. But then as I started working on this one, in its way, even though it is more stripped-down, I started doing more and more vocals.
I spent a lot of time redoing these vocals and trying to get this kind of sound that I was hearing in my head, which was kind of maybe a Simon and Garfunkel, Crosby, Stills and Nash, The Birds, those kinds of vocal groups where they have the stacked harmonies, and it's sort of a close singing. That thing really comes out of the Lugen Brothers and the Everlys and the Stanley Brothers, all these sort of family bands that had these where you have siblings who had similar voices that add up to a third voice. So I was trying to create this illusion of a third voice.
Interviewer: Yeah, that becomes a musical part. Yeah. Yeah, it blends with the music much more than just a sort of straightly vocal. Yeah.
Beck: Which was, yeah, that was a bit of work. [Laughs] Should we talk about “Country Down,” or . . .
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: Let's see, “Country Down” was something I wrote . . . I'm trying to remember what was happening with that phone. Let me grab some water.
Interviewer: It's got a slightly different sonic place on the record, hasn't it?
Beck: You know, that song was recorded at a different time.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: It was recorded a year before. I'd gone to Nashville, then I went back to the studio where we did Sea Change in Los Angeles and tried to redo some of the songs. So that's one of those. I was testing out the studio, because like I said before, they had rebuilt that studio and I wanted to see what it sounded like. But it still had that character of the room. It still had a feeling, a resonance, something that that room does. So that was recorded right after we did the Sea Change reunion shows.
Interviewer: Got you.
Beck: But yeah, you're right, it does have a different feeling.
Interviewer: Just a slightly different attitude.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: I mean ironically I'd say more Nashvillian than Californian if you'd like.
Beck: Yeah, it's right after I came back from Nashville, so it's probably more closely tied to those. And that's when I was still thinking about doing a country record.
Interviewer: Right. I'd love to talk about “Waking Light” which is a particular favorite of mine. That's an amazing song. What's “Waking Light” about?
Beck: I don't know. It was something that I wrote when I got to Nashville. They had this Steinway grand piano. It was just something that I wrote quickly. As the song came together, especially once we put the orchestra on, I kept rewriting the lyrics.
You know what? It's funny that with that song I could not get the right lyrics over and over and over. I ended up just doing a kind of improvisation where I spent a few hours just improvising lyrics. I've done that from time to time, so that's really what that is. I finally found one that felt like it was part of the song. It was speaking. It was the voice of that music.
Because I kept trying to write things that were very personal, but they felt kind of grafted onto it. They didn't really feel . . . it had to be this sort of unconscious, fluid thing with that song.
Interviewer: Sure.
Beck: And then the chorus just kind of came together at 3:00 in the morning at one point. And the chorus is very simple. It's kind of one of those simple sentiments.
Interviewer: And it goes back to this water thing. There's a sort of liquidity to this record. Does that make any sense?
Beck: Yeah, no.
Interviewer: It's like honey, sort of rolling down a hill or something. I don't know. And “Waking Light,” particularly. And obviously production- wise, it's ambitious towards the end. There's a lot going on.
Beck: A lot going on.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Beck: With the brass.
Interviewer: It took some time for us to decipher it, didn't it?
Beck: Yeah, and it's something I think I've avoided for years, that kind of making a sonic, grand statement, because that's usually the point where the bands you love trip up and fail miserably is when they kind of get these delusions of grandeur. So it is treacherous territory, getting the brass and the orchestra and the electric guitar out. It can get a little bit pompous. But again, like you said, I think we're just trying to go for that, trying to find that liquidity, that kind of rolling, big sound, you know?
Interviewer: For me, I remember when we went for that walk, a little hike down near your place in Malibu. This record is to me about 5:00 a.m. in the morning, not 6:00 p.m. or sundown.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: Do you know what I mean? It's very . . .
Beck: I think you're right, it really is a product of its environment.
Interviewer: Yeah. Out of curiosity, do you have a favorite song on the record? Is there one that sort of means more to you than others?
Beck: Yeah, I mean maybe “Wave” just because that song was the song that was done early on and it just . . . in a way, it wasn't labored over at all; it was just something that came out in a pure form. It wasn't worked up; it wasn't something that I had to sort of process and formulate. It just came. You know what I mean? There's those moments where you just let your guard down and then something just comes directly out of something, and you're not sure what or why.
But there's other songs too, the “Waking Light” and “Morning.” Some of these other songs, I think ultimately that's what I was trying to get to, that thing where it was coming directly out of a place that isn't being groomed or, you know . . .
Interviewer: No. It's just pure expression. I get you.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: Yeah, absolutely. I mean to me, there's an element of almost sort of southern spiritual to that song, “Wave.” It's a charm, if you like. It's quite . . . this is all foreboding. It's heavy.
Beck: Yeah.
Interviewer: It's not easy listening by any means, yet sonically it is. It's beautiful in its scale.
Beck: And I thought about originally doing the whole record in the vein of that song, you know? Like really adhering to that song. Which would've been interesting, but I think it does the juxtaposition with a song like “Blackbird Chain” or “Blue Moon.” It kind of maybe does give that song a little more weight.
Interviewer: Following on from that, I suppose the question is now about the future for you. You're going to obviously get out there and play these songs. In the recording sense, what comes next after Morning Phase?
Beck: Well, I'm already halfway through another record. I'm trying to see what it's going to shape into. It's really different from this, obviously. It's much more about the show; it's about the rhythms and energy. I hate to use the word celebratory. Some sort of . . . you know, those basic things. That's what live music should be, and that's something that I'm trying to reach for and to get, these kinds of songs that can move or galvanize.
You know, that's what you want when you go to a show. A lot of shows will play outdoors in the summer. And I have some songs like that, that do that, so I feel this is a bit of making up for lost time and trying to fill in some of the gaps. So I feel like I need some of those songs. That's what I'm putting my energy into now.
Interviewer: Well, I remember coming to see you play this summer and before. It was definitely way more animated on-stage than in a way I expected you to be. You don't fit the typical sort of stereotype singer- songwriter. You're all over the place jumping around. I seem to remember you doing a version of . . . you did “Loser” at Poisson Rouge and dropped straight into “Beat It” by Michael Jackson, a cover of. Do you remember that?
Beck: Yeah, we started doing that last summer.
Interviewer: With “Billie Jean,” even.
Beck: “Billie Jean,” yeah.
Interviewer: It was “Billie Jean.”
Beck: And we started doing that. It was just improvised, and then we started doing it in the shows. It was really interesting, the response, because at first I thought, "Can we do this?"
Interviewer: [Laughs]
Beck: Is it verboten? Is it . . . is this sacrilege? And every time we did it, what would happen is everybody would start singing along. That's that celebratory thing I'm speaking to.
Interviewer: So that's what you're going to tap into on your next record?
Beck: Well, I'm making an attempt. It might take a few records, you know? I mean that's what music is there for too. It should be fun as well. So that's something I'm trying to remember, that there's different facets. There's different music and different songs for different times and places.
Interviewer: Yeah, looking at your discography, it's a strange word, but you do have various music you can tap into which makes your live set fascinating. You can skip around a bit from “Loser,” Guero to say Mutations through Sea Change.
Beck: Yeah, for all occasions.
Interviewer: Yeah, but to me, seamless as well. It was seamless.
Beck: It’s going to be on my business card.