transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] There's so much TV out there that we can't get to it all. Good stuff falls through the cracks. That's why we're recommending some great TV we missed. Find out what's good to watch on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. Listen via the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2:
[00:15] This special episode of All Songs Considered comes to you from the NPR Music Podcast where if you have been listening to us, much for the past 25 plus years we've been doing the show, you know that we are pretty big fans of Beck. I've actually been on Beck Watch for a minute now because it's been a long time since he put a new album out. It's been about seven years, which is the longest that he's ever gone between albums. That's notable because he's someone who's been so prolific in the past, putting out so much stuff. In January, when he out of the blue, released this new EP of some rarities and cover songs, he featured it on the show back then. Everybody's got to learn sometime. When he released that, I started thinking, maybe he's got something in the works here. Maybe we're going to start hearing more from him this year. Sure enough, Beck is back. He's just released a brand new song. It's called Ride Lonesome. If you're a Beck fan, you know he's someone who's played around with all kinds of sounds and genres and styles and everything, in a career that stretches back more than 30 years. This new cut, we're going to play it here. It's very much like something if you know his album C Change or the album Morning Phase. It's very much like those, very introspective, kind of quieter, it's very gauzy and reflective. He's doing a lot of soul searching. We're actually going to talk with Beck all about this new song, how he came to write it, and also a little bit about what he's been up to since his last album. But first, let's hear the song Ride Lonesome. We'll play the whole cut here and then we'll hear from Beck. Yeah. So, right away, I'm getting, I'm getting Sea Change, I'm getting Morning Phase, that, that kind of sound. Is that fair to say?

Speaker 3:
[06:18] Yeah, exactly. You know, I assembled the whole troop of musicians who did those records with me. And we got Nigel Godrich who produced Sea Change. He's mixing the song.

Speaker 2:
[06:31] So, you know, your last couple of projects were very, the albums, they were very beat and synth driven albums. And when we talked about Colors after that was released, you talked about how the guitar just isn't the center of popular music as much, which I think is true. But this song and another single you released a few years ago, Thinking About You, there's a lot of guitar, more, it's very guitar forward. Is that something you've been getting back to?

Speaker 3:
[06:55] I've never gone away from the acoustic guitar. It's kind of where I started. And, you know, I really thought that I would be some sort of folk musician or country singer or something like that. I don't think the term Americana had really been born yet. But I was always drawn to that kind of sound and the idea of the one man, the man with a guitar and a song and a couple of melodies. And there's something, I wouldn't say pure or basic. There's just something very direct about it. And it doesn't really need anything else.

Speaker 2:
[07:35] Is that where you start when you're writing? Do you tend to pick up a guitar?

Speaker 3:
[07:39] No, I do all kinds of approaches. It depends on the project. I did a record with Pharrell and he had his laptop with all his, the sounds that come with the computer. So it was very, it felt very modern in that way. It was just all electronic. And so it's just kind of whatever's at hand. But at the end of the day, there's a certain comfort with an acoustic guitar or piano. And that's what I always go to. And I think if the song can just live with you singing and a single guitar on it, then it's a real song. I mean, there's all kinds of songs, but those kinds of songs just can sort of stand the test of time.

Speaker 2:
[08:19] Well, take me back to when you were writing Ride Lonesome, like just like what was going on in your life at the time.

Speaker 3:
[08:26] I think it was a bit of a lonely time. It was a lot of one of those times in your life when you're taking things in, where you've been and where you're going. You know, when you're going through difficult things, often it comes down to you kind of have to get through it yourself. You know, you have to, you just have to move forward through whatever landscape of your life and circumstances you find yourself in. And I think it's sort of that sort of dark comfort of pushing through the parts of life that are maybe not as comfortable or easy and having some distant faith that it will pull you through to the other side.

Speaker 2:
[09:06] I know Studs Terkel said, hope dies last.

Speaker 3:
[09:10] Exactly. Yeah, we were just shooting a little video for the song and I didn't realize there were all these windmills behind us. And I was thinking of Don Quixote and the sort of chasing windmills aspect of music. You know, I think you're always trying to find that unattainable. And, you know, I think I'm just, and I think this is something that will follow you through your life. You just always feel like you're just figuring it out. It's sort of like that kind of gambling instinct. You know, the people who do the claw machine to try to get the prize. Yeah, yeah, totally. That's music for me. Yeah. I just think, and I get it in the claw, and I'm gonna drop it and get the prize. And, you know, it's just always one prize away. You never quite get it.

Speaker 2:
[10:09] Do you really feel like with your songs, when you get something like, you know, Ride Lonesome or any of your work, do you really feel like, ah, it just slipped away at the last minute. I just didn't get it. Do you really think that?

Speaker 3:
[10:21] I think it's like a lot of things in life. You know, it's like the vacation that you plan or it's the thing you would imagined. And it's never quite what you thought it would be. It's always something different. Maybe sometimes it's disappointing. Sometimes it exceeds your expectations. And yeah, the songs are, they're never quite what I imagined in my mind, somehow in the translation from, you know, the brain to your fingers, to the pen on the page. It becomes something. Somehow the process has a mind of its own, and the muse has plans of its own. And so yeah, you're kind of chasing this elusive ultimate that you never quite reach. And I think that is the beauty of it. I think that's what keeps pushing us forward and striving and trying to articulate that ineffable.

Speaker 2:
[11:17] Well, to go back to Ride Lonesome, what do you hear then when you when you hear it played back to you?

Speaker 3:
[11:22] This feels like just the most simple kind of just sitting at a time. Like I grew up when I was learning to play music and write songs. I listened to a lot of Hank Williams, a lot of Woody Guthrie, a lot of cowboy music, a lot of some Bob Dylan, some of that 70s singer-songwriter stuff. It's all cowboy influences, it all has that country-western thing about it. And so to me, it just feels like part of that thread of songs.

Speaker 2:
[11:56] But I mean, do you feel like the claw dropped it into the little compartment for you to pull it out and you got what you were?

Speaker 3:
[12:01] Yeah. Well, that song just came out really fast. This one just came really quick.

Speaker 2:
[12:06] That's a good sign for you?

Speaker 3:
[12:08] I think when I think of songs that I've done that people like or they connect to immediately, they're songs that were made really quickly. There wasn't a lot of thought. And I have to say most of my songwriting, there's a lot of thought going on.

Speaker 2:
[12:24] Too much, you think?

Speaker 3:
[12:26] Yeah. Sometimes too much. Sometimes they're just a little too clever. I think the ultimate is just writing something simple and universal that doesn't take a lot of trying to decipher simplicity is the ultimate. And it's something that I've always, I didn't always reach. But it is the ultimate goal. It's the kind of beautiful musical balance. Something just comes out balanced. And there's a lot of songs like that, that have given me comfort. And every once in a while, you write one for yourself and it's not even particular to an even particular moment in life. It's something, we hit those points constantly through life. We're always moving up the mountain. It's, and just when you think you figured it out or you got to the top, it's, you know, there's more and more to climb.

Speaker 2:
[13:24] When we talked a number of years ago, after Colors came out, you did say something about just like the healing power of music. Do you turn to music to work through your feelings or to even find what your feelings are?

Speaker 3:
[13:37] Yeah, I think it's a bit of both. And I think it's a bit of a divining rod. It's, sometimes you feel like the guy on the beach with the metal detector, trying to find a few nuggets buried in the sand. Sometimes it's just for your own comfort or your own benefit. Sometimes you're trying to figure something out. You're trying to articulate something you don't quite understand. Sometimes I'll write a song. I have no idea why I wrote it, where it came from. Until years later, I'll hear it and go, oh, it's obvious what that was.

Speaker 2:
[14:10] Well, as you were combing the beach with that metal detector, what did you find this time around?

Speaker 3:
[14:16] I think I found a couple of old cans, I found a couple of pretty shells. Well, I live in Southern California, so I probably found a little bit of oil spill debris. There's got to be a little something apocalyptic in it.

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[15:07] Well, tell me what brought you back to working with Nigel. I mean, you guys have obviously worked together a lot over the years, but by my math, it's been like 20 years, I think. Was it the information in like 2006? What brought you back together?

Speaker 3:
[15:20] Well, I was in London playing a couple of nights at the Royal Albert Hall. I was doing some symphony shows and he came down and I was just starting to finish these songs. I think I played him a few things and I asked him if he would consider mixing it because he had this big beautiful studio and he really is the best. He's pulling back a bit of my rampant spacey reverb that I would put all over everything, drench it in tons of reverberant echoey drenched sound that kind of makes it a bit murky and mysterious. And he kind of brings it back to earth a little bit.

Speaker 2:
[16:01] So it's been seven years since your last album, which is the longest stretch you've gone. I'm just wondering what you've been up to. I know you've been doing some claps and singles.

Speaker 3:
[16:11] Yeah, I had to wait a couple of years to get back to work.

Speaker 2:
[16:15] After COVID, you mean?

Speaker 3:
[16:17] Yeah. Meanwhile, I did a song with Gorillaz and I did one with Paul McCartney and we did a fun video together. I helped write a Black Keys album called Ohio Players. I think I wrote like 10 or 12, worked on 10 or 12 of those songs. Then I'd just been working on my music pretty constantly. I'd been working on this record year and a half, two years, probably two years and a bunch of other things. I built a recording studio. What else I've been doing? I've been living life.

Speaker 2:
[16:47] Yeah. I just wondered if you were maybe enjoying being out of the album cycle for a while. Just enjoying being a dad or?

Speaker 3:
[16:55] Yeah, I do try to find that balance. But I think I'm writing a lot of songs. It's been a very prolific time for me. Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[17:02] Are you writing every day?

Speaker 3:
[17:04] I wish. But yeah, no, I've definitely been digging into the writing. There's a certain amount of process of experimenting, I guess what they would call research and discovery, where you're in the laboratory trying to come up with what the next thing is, and there's a lot of trial and error. So I probably have made multiple albums worth of music that probably no one will hear. But hopefully, it leads to something that you will hear.

Speaker 2:
[17:36] Well, yeah. I mean, can you say what you've got cooking next since we're starting to get more Beck this year?

Speaker 3:
[17:42] Yeah. I got lots of things cooking. There's all kinds of music. I've been in the studio a lot, running off the last, let's say, four years with my band. There's a group of musicians I came up with that were my touring band for a lot of my early records, and everybody's gone off to bigger and better things. But we still get together, and we'll find a couple of days here and there and make some music. And yeah, I have a lot of different projects I want to do. So hopefully, there's time to get to all of them.

Speaker 2:
[18:11] Yeah. You know, when I imagine you getting together with your old friends like that, your old touring group, getting in the studio and making music, it makes me think of how, like you had this period, it's been, I mean, gosh, it's been like 15 years or so ago where you were just doing so much. You were like, you were dropping albums and you were touring. But you're also doing these other things like record club.

Speaker 3:
[18:32] Yeah.

Speaker 2:
[18:32] You and your friends were covering whole albums where you did song reader, where you released an album as sheet music. I remember thinking, this guy just really loves this. There's no other motivation other than, it's like McCartney. McCartney just keeps going, you seem like he just loves it. He just loves doing it. There's literally no other motivation other than he loves that.

Speaker 3:
[18:58] Yeah. It's not the easiest thing to do in the world. It definitely has its rewards. It's a lot of just digging through the coal mine, just trying to get one little something, but the whole process is, it's something you have to love. You have to be compelled to do it. I think of it as a calling and it's not always for the faint of heart. But yeah, it really is something that you wake up and you want to work on a song. You want to try to pull a piece of music apart and see what a song can do. And I don't even think of it as a, it's not even something that you're trying to do to build a career or anything. I think of it as that concept of like, I'm on the 405 freeway of songs. I'm just like one car on a freeway of millions of cars, and we're all pushing towards something. I don't know. And maybe you come up with a song that reminds somebody else of another idea that gets them to write a song. And it's just kind of this chain reaction. And yeah, I just see myself kind of in this sort of music making, you know, flow or river of so much going on. And so you're just kind of contributing to this sort of unruly big mess. And yeah, I like to get into those waters and let it carry me downstream and see where it goes.

Speaker 2:
[20:24] It gives you just as much life and.

Speaker 3:
[20:26] Yeah, honestly, I mean, the last few years, I just, if I think about making music, I feel like I'm just getting started. And I don't know if other musicians have that. I'm look, I mean, if I was Paul McCartney and written the best songs ever by the time I was 30, and maybe I would feel a little different. But, you know, look at him, even he doesn't. I think he feel still feels he's got just as good music in him. And I think I honestly I looked at my music and I think this is I haven't even really done what I want to do. I'm just flailing around a bit. And maybe you never get there. Maybe it just never happens. But the possibility is always feels there.

Speaker 2:
[21:11] That's Beck talking about his new song, Ride Lonesome. You know, I tried to get him to tell us whether there was a new album on the way. We kind of were dancing around it a little bit. You heard him allude to lots of things in the works. He's been writing a bunch. That was great to hear. So, I'm hopeful, you know, even if there's no official word yet on a new full length or when it might happen. But always good to reconnect with him and of course get this new music. He's one of those artists for me who he just never seems to miss. And if Ride Lonesome is any indication of what Beck's got coming next, I am there for it. We're going to have a whole new All Songs Considered for you on Tuesday. Sheldon Pierce will be back to talk about our picks for the best new songs of the week. I totally would have included this Beck song, Ride Lonesome on it, if we hadn't had a chance to talk about it here. Also, Alt.Latino on Wednesday. We have a plus episode of the show every other Thursday, and that's what's happening this week. Ann Powers and Daoud Tyler-Amin, they're going to do a deep dive on Blitzkrieg Bop by the Ramones. And of course, we'll close out the week with new music Friday. Until then, thanks so much for listening. It's All Songs Considered from NPR Music.