Beck to the future

As interview requests go, this should have been a cinch. Beck is not asking for 20 dozen long-stemmed roses. Nor would he care for an all-white, silk-draped dressing-room á la J.Lo. Nope, the pint-sized superstar currently located backstage at the Ambassador would simply prefer that no one who interviews him has a cold. He has already had a bad experience with a sputum-spewing journalist, and his vocal cords are decidedly delicate.

Your correspondent shoves several hundred Kleenex deep in pockets, makes covert attempts to clear a worryingly rosy-tipped nose and – thankfully – gains permission to enter the inner sanctum where Beck Hanson resides, all pink cheeks, bleached blond hair and frighteningly-famous rock-star aura.

Dublin is Beck’s latest stop on a low-key tour to promote his beautiful eighth album Sea Change. The Nigel Godrich-produced record marks yet another progression for Beck, melding classically simple, sombre songs with soaring melodies and surprisingly heartfelt lyrics. There are echoes of his sixth record Mutations here, but the overall result is altogether more accomplished, more mature.

What approach did Beck take to the writing of the record?

“My feeling at the time was… good songs,” he says. “A good song is something that transcends the performer. It’s like a balloon, it just floats away and somebody else will grab it. I was looking at people like Hank Williams and Hoagy Carmichael, and the simplicity and timelessness of their songs. I wanted to discipline myself to try to create something like that.

“A lot of the other songs I’d written were experiments, and related a lot to the sound and conceptual aspects. These songs just stand on their own, whether I’m singing them or whoever. The most challenging thing is to write the simple thing. And to write something heartfelt that isn’t sickening.”

Although Beck would prefer not to highlight it, there was another agenda at play during the making of Sea Change. In June 2000, three weeks shy of his thirtieth birthday, Beck split up with Leigh Limon, his girlfriend of nine years. They had been together since long before ‘Loser’ and Odelay, long before Beck was anything more than just another singer-songwriter trying to scratch a living from the Los Angeles folk music scene.

On record, Beck sounds devastated by their separation. The track ‘Already Dead’ finds him singing about how “Love looks away/In the harsh light of the day/On the edge of nothing more/Days fade to black/In the light of what they lack/It feels like I’m watching something dyin’.” On another track, he tells of how “It’s only tears that I’m cryin’/It’s only you that I’m losin’/I guess I’m doing fine”.

In person, Beck would really rather not discuss the subject. Asked any question which touches on the relationship, the star showcases a brilliant knack for evasion. He misconstrues questions, ignores them and generally rollerpins all but the most innocuous queries to death. The closest he will come to talking about the break-up is when he is asked whether great pain leads to great art.

“That’s a lie,” he says immediately. “When you’re just destroyed by something, you don’t think, ‘Oh, I’ll pick up a pen and write a song, that’d be a nice thing to do’. Most of the time, when you’re in that situation, it’s the last thing you’re thinking of. But I’ve had enough times in my life that I could draw on, probably to write ten more albums.”

Beck has never lived a very ordinary existence. Born Bek David Campbell in 1970, he was brought up in the midst of the Los Angeles bohemian scene. His mother, Bibbe Hansen, is a former acolyte of Andy Warhol, his father – who appears on the Sea Change album – arranges strings for bands like Aerosmith. Beck’s grandfather, Al Hansen, was a visual artist well known for pushing out boundaries – and pianos over five-storey buildings.
It was hardly the kind of upbringing to turn a child into Ronan Keating. Even today, Beck appears to have few commercial ambitions.

“I just do what interests me,” he says. “Honestly, what comes out is kind of random. A song like ‘Sexx Laws’ was just one night fooling around in the studio. I wrote it and there it is. I don’t think it sums me up, but it’s a snapshot of the moment.”

So he’s not changing genres to keep up with the times?

“I’ll probably do the genre when it’s over,” Beck laughs. “When we were doing Midnite Vultures, I was really into early eighties electro and ’60s soundtrack boogaloo. When I did the record, I had friends saying, ‘What the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?’. But it all comes around eventually.

“I used to play a lot of slide guitar and blues, and people would comment that it sounded like bar band music. Now you’ve got The White Stripes and The Black Keys. It’s the musician’s job to change people’s tastes.”

With this in mind, it’s hardly surprising to discover that Beck has another metamorphosis planned for his next album. At his gig the previous night, the musician looked as though he was yearning to rediscover his two-turntables-and-a-microphone groove. Sure enough, the next album will feature some seriously funky music.

“The next record is definitely going to be up,” Beck says. “In the past, I shied away from doing something that sounded too much like Odelay, but I have a lot of material sitting around that really does sound like Odelay.”

Finally, what are Beck’s ambitions as an artist?

“The most important thing is writing a good song,” he says. “Writing a song where I can say ‘yeah, that’s a decent song’. And to contribute something to music. Maybe it’s corny, but I feel like I’ve got a lot from music. It’s really informed the way I see the world. I want to give back to whatever it is that underpins music in general.”