Beck To Basics

Beck Hanson walks into the room, pale and absurdly thin, his vast moon-calf eyes bright with weirdness. Yet it takes a moment, a skipped heartbeat, for recognition to sink in. This is Beck? The proto-slacker? Generation X poster-child? Grooviest white guy on the planet? You were, to be frank, expecting someone a little taller.

He slumps onto a couch, his movements oddly poised and awkward. While there is none of the wariness you sometimes encounter in performers of his stature, you sense his detachment. Beck is here – but he’s somewhere else as well.
When he speaks it is slowly, in creaking, meandering sentences that seem to arrive from a place very far away. Reconciling this intense, soporific individual with the impulsive, compulsive Beck of your record collection demands something of an imaginative leap.
Or does it? Fans will recognise that there are two, quite distinct, Becks: the hip-hop referencing indie-pop icon of ‘Loser’ and Odelay and the tortured screw-up who only fully revealed himself on 2003’s Sea Change, a sad sweeping chronicle of heartbreak and inner emptiness. There’s no doubt which Beck is sitting in front of you, raising the question: how much of a contrivance is the other dude?
“The hip-hop mash up stuff is something I’ve always known I could return to pretty much at will,” says Beck of his new album, Guero, a swaggering refinement of the Odelay formula (both were produced in collaboration with folk-hop trailblazers The Dust Brothers).
“You know, you have a bunch of tools in your kit and you use them where appropriate. I’d planned on getting back together with The Dust Brothers for a long time. But first I was busy and then they were busy... and well, it took a while to happen.”
Is he disappointed that Guero (latino slang for ‘white boy’) has been hailed as a return to form after Sea Change, a project widely dismissed as miserable and indulgent?
“Sea Change wasn’t supposed to be a downbeat album per se. I wanted to explore simple melodies, to do something that was melancholic. I’ve always found that music of that sort has an uplifting quality. Even if I’m not feeling particularly low, I enjoy music that, maybe, is a little sad and mysterious.”
Writing Guero was not, he insists, a reaction to the lackluster performance of Sea Change (by some distance his worst selling major label LP). The two albums had been sketched out at the same time; Beck decided to record Sea Change first, in part because The Dust Brothers were not available to work on Guero.
“It was always my intention to come back to that Odelay sound. It’s true that I felt the need to get away from it for a while because, obviously, there’s a danger people will know you for one thing only and you’ll end up typecast, sort of,” he says.
“I found it hard to leave behind ‘Loser’ [his 1993 breakthrough single] for a long time. People began to associate me with that slide-guitar sound, although, for years, I didn’t even pick up a slide guitar. By the time it came to make Guero, I felt I’d done enough other stuff to be able to return to that territory.”
He denies plotting his career in a cold and calculating fashion but says the success of Odelay afforded him the opportunity to explore avenues which might not otherwise have presented themselves. Strangely, Beck thinks his most indulgent record was 1999’s Midnite Vultures, a cod-funk masterpiece that suggested Prince, Lenny Bruce and Hank Williams sharing a cab ride home.
“Midnite Vultures was a conceit I was keen to push as far as possible. I wanted to see how far I could bring that thing without it seeming preposterous. I’m not sure why I made that album – it was something I almost dared myself to do. I was curious to see if I could pull it off.”
Beck was raised by his beatnik mother (an occasional folk musician and full time scientologist) in a Latino neighborhood of Los Angeles. This unorthodox upbringing has, he feels, skewed his opinion of mainstream America, imbuing his music with a distinctive quality: a playful, sardonic detachment.
“I’m from white America but not of it. In the neighborhood where I grew up – I was practically the only white kid on the block. So I’m on the outside, looking in. I am aware of the mainstream but, you know, I don’t belong there. I think that’s a pretty good place for an artist to be.”

Guero is out now on Universal.