Beck has spoken to NME about tapping into a certain spiritual and emotional realm for his new album ‘Ride Lonesome’, as well as his often misunderstood genre-hopping musical journey to here from the ’90s.
We met Beck in a studio space at his label’s London offices where he was lucid but admittedly “in jet lag mode, man” – quite fitting to talk about his beautiful new album ‘Ride Lonesome’, which he described as a “slow motion, twilight, Mojave, acoustic, a trance of sound and emotion”
It’s been seven long years since his previous album ‘Hyperspace‘, but it’s not as if the singer, songwriter and composer has been resting on laurels. As well as the enforced stop-gap of COVID and lockdowns, he’s gone out on several world tours – including his acclaimed orchestral theatre run last year – as well as labouring on the songs that would go on to make up ‘Ride Lonesome’ with gruelling attention to detail.
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“In another era, it probably would have come out a year and a half ago,” he told NME. “I was initially going to finish this record and have it come out in 2023, but I ended up shelving it for two years. I wasn’t sure about the songs, I didn’t think they were strong enough, and I just wasn’t in the mood for what the record would require to really fully live it and bring it to life.”
Would it be fair to say that Beck is quite hard on himself?
“I’m realistic!” he replied. “You hope for the best for some of your songs, but as you get older you’re a little more realistic about the song is and what it could be.”
A record in the more acoustic and emotion-swept lineage of his classics ‘Sea Change’ and Grammy-winning ‘Morning Phase’ rather than the genre-smashing alt-rock party soundtrack of ‘Mellow Gold’, ‘Odelay’ or ‘Midnite Vultures’, Beck teamed up again with some old friends to bottle a different type of magic. It was made with his original touring band from the ’90s that recorded ‘Sea Change’ and ‘Morning Phase’ and mixed by Nigel Godrich (who produced the former), a collection of musicians Beck described as his version “The Wrecking Crew”.
“There’s a musical chemistry that’s something gratifying for us,” he shared. “It’s a relationship over many decades that just gets deeper and has more shapes, colour and nuance through time.”
Beck. CREDIT: Autumn De WildeCheck out the rest of our interview with Beck below, where he also told us about putting together “a heartbreak record”, his struggle to be sincere when people in the ’90s found it “nauseating”, and why human connection will always win out over AI.
NME: Hello Beck. ‘Ride Lonesome’ is something of a spiritual successor to ‘Sea Change’ and ‘Morning Phase’. What does it take to make this kind of record over say, ‘sex rock Beck’?
Beck: “You have to have patience. This kind of music takes a lot of time, and you can’t just go and knock it out. The singing, the playing, everything has to hit the right kind of emotion. Some days, that just doesn’t come. There’s a lot of time waiting for things to align. I had to sit with everything for a while to get a sense of how to sing it, how to play it, how to make it fly.”
In terms of emotional authenticity, these records always tap into something. What can you tell us about where you mind needs to be at to get into that space?
“A lot of the music was born around the time of COVID, and a lot of the songs were written because I was stuck inside my house by myself for a couple of weeks. It just happens organically. It isn’t something you can control or plan, but it’s where I was at.”
What sets it apart from ‘Sea Change’ and ‘Morning Phase’?
“I think it’s more related to ‘Morning Phase’ than ‘Sea Change’. For better or worse, early on I didn’t really define or differentiate different types of records that I would make. I started out making more folky singer-songwriter records on tapes and things, then I had this fluke thing I did with ‘Loser’ and there was a lot of talk before my first album came out: ‘Do we name these as two different things?’ My manager and the label were like, ‘No, let’s call them the same thing’.
“The ethos at the time was that the audience would just have to accept everything, warts and all. Some of my peers have different acts, like an electronic dance project and a proper rock band, then like more compositional or singer-songwriter things and call it something else. I didn’t really do that. It’s made for a bit of confusion, but there’s definitely a different ethos for this kind of record rather than one like ‘Midnite Vultures’, which is almost a different project.”
Lyrically, what were you mining on this album?
“It’s kind of a heartbreak record. It’s pretty obvious! A lot of the writing is very direct. It’s about reckoning with loss, letting things go, navigating these emotionally impossible places and trying get through those moments.
“There’s romantic loss, there’s losing a loved one – a good friend – and just changing eras of your life. These are the kind of songs I wanted to do when I was young, but the musical climate at the time was pretty inhospitable to this kind of music. It took a long time to get that kind of courage to be this direct and emotional. I came up at a time when you get up in a bar, a club or an all-ages cafe or something, you start strumming elegiacally and you be booed, have things thrown at you and get heckled.
“I would sneak in or keep to myself. There were bands and artists I knew. I was friends with Elliott Smith, Lou Barlow – they were writing more quiet and introspective music at a time when it just wasn’t fashionable. I remember feeling nervous for them because I had my own PTSD of trying to navigate that. I remember trying to perform heartfelt songs and finger-picked acoustic music, then by the end of it just screaming ‘MTV MAKES ME WANT TO SMOKE CRACK’, then people’s fists were up in the air and they were happy to hear it.”
It was a strange balance in the ‘90s when people said that they wanted authenticity but at the same time sincerity seemed…
“…nauseating, yes. I don’t think other generations had to deal with that. There’s a fashion for every moment. Led Zeppelin wasn’t trying to make big band music, Frank Sinatra wasn’t trying to play music hall ditties or whatever was possible the previous generation. It would be difficult to try and make a record like this back then.”
Right now, folk and country so in vogue, there are a lot of young indie and pop artists smashing genres and sounds together like you did, ‘bedroom music’ can fill arenas now. Do you feel accepted now and do you sense your influence?
“Not really. I have a lot of peers where I see their influence everywhere. It’s the same way that you don’t sing my songs at karaoke, the lyrics are too weird. A lot of my peers wrote great karaoke songs that anyone could sing. When I was younger I was always deconstructing and trying to subvert the very song I was working on, so a lot of it wasn’t really conducive to direct influence.
“I don’t think that younger people would maybe notice that my early records were really aggressively genre-defiant. That’s something taken for granted now, but at the time it was highly transgressive. I remember getting a lot of shit for it, especially from journalists.
“I understand it, but at the time smashing genres together in an almost somewhat antagonistic way was for me almost a sort of post-modern punk rock. You couldn’t really shock people with volume or even lyrical content. Even Pixies, who were after punk, the way they shocked people was really aggressive music with really cute and sweet melodies. That was punk. For me the only that was punk was to flagrantly smash rap together with country, noise and symbolist poetry and see what happens. I remember being told constantly that this came off to people as a type of insincerity, or a lack of spine to claim my own sound and corner.”
Then you were called ‘slacker rock’, but actually putting quite a lot of effort in…
“Yeah, that was funny. The background I came from was working all the time just to survive. I would have loved to have that suburban life of living in my parents’ garage and not needing to have a job… ‘slacking’, as they say. The previous generation will always throw some kind of name or catchphrase on the younger generation to bring them down a notch or at least be reductionist.
“A clip popped up recently of Dean Martin (who I love) introducing The Rolling Stones on his TV show, and he’s rolling his eyes. I was talking to Conan O’Brien recently and he said he always made a policy to never make jokes about artists, especially younger performers that weren’t of his generation. That never comes off well in the history. I’ve always felt that it’s important to welcome or support new artists coming up.”
How do you think young Beck would have fared in the current landscape?
“I think that there’d be a lot more room and acceptance. There were a lot of rules at the time when I was coming up. I’m sure Radiohead or Björk or anyone else coming up at that time would have to say the same thing. Records like ‘Post’, ‘Homogenic’ or ‘Kid A’, were really hitting walls of resistance. I remember hitting that with ‘Odelay’ and even ‘Sea Change’. People were storming out of those shows and I lost a lot of audience. It felt a little self-destructive with my audience, but intuition is always correct. Those records are probably more popular with the people who come to my shows now than those that sold infinitely more at the time.”
Speaking of intuition, people have been talking a lot about use of AI in music – with Dr Dre “embracing” it as a tool. You’ve just done an orchestral tour which is a very human effort and made an album like this. Where do you stand?
“It’s driven me in recent years. Most of these songs were recorded live in a room. It’s just five people in a room playing: take no punches, tape no changes, this is who we are and this is what we sound like together sitting in a space in realtime.
“I don’t say that’s better than programming some beats on your laptop, that’s fine. I just prefer more of a human effort. I’ve found myself really drawn to orchestras over the last decade, and I go to them quite a lot. I had a couple of years where I’d go to them every week, just to sit there in a room in this ridiculously outmoded way of making music happen when we can just have an orchestra on our iPhone.
“The beauty of 80 people sitting together, playing a piece of music just feels so humanly indulgent. In a world of things being optimised and streamlined, it just feels so beautifully counterintuitive yet humanising and gratifying. I can’t quite put my finger on it.
“Like any technology, there are great benefits, but you’re also going to lose great things too. You gain and you lose with each step. I didn’t have an iPhone until five or six years ago. I held out for a really long time.”
How much happier were you?
“I was better off, any my eyes were better.”
Can we expect a very ‘human’ tour?
“The tour is going to be very different. It’s going to be different to any other tour I’ve done. It’s definitely going to be an experience. It’s going to be slow and dark with a quality of otherness and remoteness. I don’t want it to feel like a rock show, I’m going for a theatre production directed by Robert Wilson or something.”
You made the album with your old pal and drummer Joey Waronker, who also joined you at Royal Albert Hall last year in a break from touring with Oasis. Will he be with you at your shows in 2026 and 2027?
“I don’t get Joey. He’s a busy man, but he played on the record and we always play together when we have a chance.”
Are you already thinking of the next record? Will it be another seven year wait?
“I’m always in the middle of a bunch of projects. I have records that have been simmering for many years. They’re ready when they’re ready. When ‘Sea Change’ came out people were like, ‘Where did this come from?’ I’d been working on a record like that for a dozen years by that point. Some of the songs on ‘Sea Change’ were 10 years old by then. Hopefully there won’t be a seven year gap.”
Beck releases ‘Ride Lonesome’ on September 18 via Capitol Records, before a North American tour kicks off on September 22. Visit here for tickets and more information.
The post Beck tells us about ‘Ride Lonesome’: “It took a long time to get that kind of courage to be this direct and emotional” appeared first on NME.