This article was taken from the April 2014 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
From sheet-music and web-only releases to acoustic albums, Beck stays ahead by keeping his fans guessing. Back with his twelfth album, and his first for six years, Morning Phase, Beck discusses his mercurial style, and his experiments with new ways of reaching his fans.
**Wired: What inspires you to continually change your sound?
Beck:** I tend to be drawn to things that don't quite work and I'm interested in figuring out ways to make them work.
Something like [1999 album] Midnite Vultures is a good example -- let's go in this direction and see if I can make something that isn't horribly embarrassing.
You've experimented with projects such as Beck Hansen's Song Reader, where you published songs as sheet music. How did that come about? In the sheet music book for [1996 album] Odelay, somebody had transcribed the little weird loops and guitar squeals into the piano arrangement, and it just looked unplayable and not musical. I felt bad for the prospective buyer. That's a sad by-product of modern album-making. Sometimes it is more about the production and the sound, rather than the underlying song. So I thought I should write a bunch of songs for a song book.
You've also experimented with putting out recordings and other sorts of content on your website. Not so much any more, but I spent an entire year just devoting time to my website. Just to see what would happen -- I treated it like an album-release cycle. Instead of putting out an album and touring, I thought I'd create something and give it to people to see what they do with it, and see what path that leads me down. A website is a great vehicle to do that.
What was the result? It was an interesting experiment but, ultimately, it is hard to quantify what it is and who's listening. The average person was staying there for seven seconds. So I realised that the attention span on the internet is very short, and what makes what I do work is having that intimate moment with a listener. Trying to feed this internet machine is interesting, but not as fulfilling as performing or putting out a proper album.
Is that something else that prompted you to return to acoustic music? I feel like I could get into the mix of all that now, but what I wanted was just to do something really simple and personal.
Instead of spending time in the studio messing with sounds, I spent it with the songs. I was trying to get to that personal or emotional place, in a way that didn't feel like it was just kind of rehashing what somebody did 40 years ago -- in that singer-songwriter era -- but using the same tools. It was about going back to the basics, in a way, and exploring a really personal kind of music.
Beck's new album Morning Phase is out now on Virgin EMI Records.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
