Beck has often used indirection to his advantage. In his roughly twenty-five-year career, he has made so many costume changes that nobody was surprised when, for instance, he released a lavishly produced book called “Song Reader,” which offered twenty new songs only in sheet-music form. His first commercial success was “Loser,” in 1993, a song that seemed like a loving translation of a rap tune from English into Dada. Since then, I’ve watched him play greatest-hits sets with his longtime travelling band, and work with gospel choirs. All these endeavors have wandered in and out of sense—and brilliance—as if there were so many songs trying to get out of Beck that sometimes the execution lost to the writing.
His new album, “Morning Phase,” is a triumph, possibly because he’s never made a record so focussed. He describes it as both a “healing” and a “reckoning.” For forty-seven minutes, Beck and some of his closest collaborators cast a benevolent spell that refuses to break. The album speaks powerfully and directly, without gimmicks or puns, and it maintains a near-total gentleness. After listening to “Morning Phase” almost fifty times, I can’t find a single thing wrong with it. Even if you listen to popular music all day, every day, you don’t get many albums like this in your lifetime. The relationship between the musician and the listener here is as simple as the outcome is intense: only the artist knows exactly how such an album is made, but only the audience can verify that it is perfect.
“Song Reader,” which was put out by McSweeney’s, was Beck’s previous album-length work. I attempted to play one of the songs from the sheet music. It was called “Heaven’s Ladder,” and it sounded roughly like “Yellow Submarine,” because I mangled the cadences, turning it into a camp singalong. But a live recording of Beck performing it in Los Angeles, easily found on the Web, has him playing it with a choir. It sounds as if it might be found in a hundred-year-old hymnal. The feeling is that of re-creating the DNA of American song, in the traditional numbers that would normally be credited to “Anon.”: protest songs, ballads, storytelling tunes.
The influence of such songs started Beck playing music. He told me that, growing up in Los Angeles, he learned about Delta blues through word of mouth. Then, he said, “I found a book at the local library that had some of these songs written out. I had heard of Leadbelly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, but I had never heard them.” A friend played Beck some of the songs on guitar. “He was a virtuoso, with all the slide-guitar techniques,” Beck said. “He didn’t give me lessons, really, but I got to watch him play these songs.”
That material informed Beck’s earliest recordings, like “One Foot in the Grave” (1994), where he replaced the gravitas of the original performers with less reverential lyrics. The chorus of “Asshole,” a rough-strummed acoustic song that fit perfectly with the confrontational feel of the Pacific Northwest in the nineties—it was recorded in Olympia—goes, “She’ll do anything to make you feel like an asshole.” This push and pull between American roots music and what was in the air at the time has marked all Beck’s music. Beginning with “Loser,” which is still his best-known song, through the 1999 album “Midnite Vultures,” which revisited early-eighties funk, he has been on a sometimes confusing search for the right voice. The journey has been impressive in its fearlessness, but its results have often threatened to sound like camp. His calm, sincere demeanor in interviews usually allayed the idea that he was having fun at someone else’s expense, yet it was never quite clear which version of Beck worked best.
Before the new album, my favorite was “Mutations” (1998), which draws heavily on Brazilian music and is generally plangent. “Nobody’s Fault But My Own” grabbed me; it’s sung plainly, with little percussion, but it’s accompanied by strings, a slightly out-of-place sitar, and, most important, an unqualified embrace of sheer beauty. The lyrics are gnomic—there is talk of a “counterfeit” moon and “heartless tales”—but the mood is restrained and empathic, the harmonies unabashedly gorgeous. “I was really wary of recording that one,” Beck told me. “It seemed too precious or something, not at all like the more confrontational stuff going on.”
In conversation, Beck referred repeatedly to his large number of unfinished albums. Combined with his halting way of speaking—as if it might take a day to find the right word—his habit of not finishing albums suggests that, despite his mellow and unflappable ways, there is a steely, unforgiving part of him that senses when pieces form a genuine whole. He’s willing to ditch entire sessions if the work doesn’t go in the direction he wants.
The creation of “Morning Phase” began five years ago, with a song called “Wave,” but the bulk of it came in a short burst of recording, in January, 2013. At the Ocean Way studios, in L.A. and Nashville, Beck played with a core of musicians he’s played with for more than fifteen years: the guitarist Smokey Hormel, the bassist Justin Meldal-Johnsen, the keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning, Jr., and the drummers Joey Waronker and James Gadson. Beck said, “I wouldn’t want to speak for them, but I think these songs resonated in a way for them with the places our lives have gone: losing parents and going through divorces and having kids.”
The Beck album being cited in the press as a precursor to “Morning Phase” is “Sea Change,” from 2002. Though it is an elegant record, sitting in the warm, mid-tempo range of Los Angeles rock like Crosby, Stills & Nash and Gordon Lightfoot, it has that “Who knows?” quality that can bring Beck’s music down. His voice is oddly smeared, as if he were trying to invent an accent.
“Morning Phase” is everything boiled down to its essence and presented in full voice, simplified at the level of writing and then filled out with strings and harmony vocals, none of it obtrusively clever. “When we played, it was absolutely effortless,” Beck said. “We didn’t have to work to get that sound. It’s all been sitting right inside everybody.”
Although the album was built around “Wave,” the keystone is set at the beginning, with a string passage called “Cycle,” less than a minute long, which recurs later under various songs. It exits swiftly, and in comes a song called “Morning.” Beck begins to strum an acoustic guitar alone, and the band sneaks in under him with a kind of loving stealth. In a high but clear voice, Beck sings, “Woke up this morning from a long night in the storm. Looked up this morning, saw the roses full of thorns. Mountains are falling—they don’t have nowhere to go. The ocean’s a diamond that only shines when you’re alone.” It’s an aesthetic template for the album. The vocals are direct, with no extra affectations of phrasing. Beck’s solo voice is filled out with high harmonies, and then left alone again. Piano, electric piano, and glockenspiel sketch notes around the main chords, all of them subservient to the song. The long night in the storm may have a warm and fuzzy California sound, but it’s equally clear that it was a real storm, and that there is an attempt to deal with whatever made the mountains fall.
This combination of thick, generous sound with emotionally direct lyrics makes “Morning Phase” feel not like an examination of genre or a formal experiment but like a summoning of energy. It is not hard to believe that, as Beck said, he had experienced “a frustration over the years trying to get a certain feeling into a recording.” This time, he went on, “the sessions were just me, and whatever engineer I could get. There was no producer other than me. I just had my band. It was a lone endeavor.” This may be why the album hits so hard, in spite of its laid-back and inoffensive exterior. “Morning Phase” is the sound of one person telling us how he made it to the dawn, surrounded only by his closest friends. I can’t imagine someone who couldn’t find some succor or beauty here. This is the mellow gold that Beck told us about two decades ago, without knowing what it was. ♦
