MORNING CONFESSIONAL? WIND BACK WEDNESDAY FINDS BECK REVELLING, MAYBE REVEALING
- 7 days ago
- 5 min read
Come May, armed with an orchestra, maybe a rumpled suede suit, but definitely songs from albums like Sea Change, Mutations and Morning Phase, the artist once, currently and very likely forever known as Beck will be in Australia. Or at least Sydney and Melbourne, which is not quite the same thing admittedly, but if you don't tell Adelaide et al, I won't. (Tickets on sale tomorrow, see below.)
It’s not his first tour here, obviously, but will be the tour with the highest body count – on stage, that is, not heading to the morgue – and one with a certain mood, judging by the albums being highlighted.
Wind Back Wednesday investigates some of the background while we wait the winter foreground of his shows, landing on this 2014 interview just as Morning Phase was released, and Sea Change was in tune. No vultures were evident at any time.
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BECK HANSEN GREW UP in 1970s California as not just an arty kid in an arty house (his grandfather an artist, his mother an artist and actor, his father a screen composer and arranger) but someone with as much of a grasp on irony and oblique strategies as on the many instruments he would come to play.
However, long before his drawled song about ego that became a mistaken anthem for the slacker generation, Loser, the mix of folk and hip hop that made Odelay one of the defining albums of the 1990s or the Prince-inspired funk fest of Midnite Vultures, the boy then known as Bek David Campell was soaking up something almost painfully free of irony.
As he describes it, he grew up in an era of songs about getting in touch with your feelings, putting them out there and inviting empathy or sympathy. The singer/songwriters like Neil Young and Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell and David Ackles left a mark on him he says.
It can be hard to reconcile that though with a reputation that, 2002’s Sea Change album aside, is one of deliberately avoiding personal revelation or cloaking it in sufficient opaqueness to minimise the possibility of a listener connecting the song to the man.
Morning Phase, his new album – the first in six years while he was busy with production work, a book of sheet music for unrecorded songs the public could interpret themselves, touring and recovery from spine damage - is an album which superficially at least draws strongly from that 1970s scene. It’s softer and more intimate sounding, it features lines such “If I surrender/And I don’t fight this wave/ I won’t go under/I will only be carried away” which suggest some baring of the soul.
But is it? Are we – was he? - getting in touch with his feelings?
"I think it's a little simplistic to blanket say on other records you couldn't tell what my feelings or intentions were because I feel that there's a lot of emotions happening in the other records,” Hansen says with a measured, if not to say recumbent, pace. There are pauses within his sentences which last longer than modern Labor prime ministers.
“Lyrically, on some of this record, I'm much more simple, but just because you are using recurrent images and combinations of words doesn't mean that there isn't meaning there, doesn't mean that there isn't emotion there."
It's not to suggest that there is no emotion evident in some of his albums but rather that it’s always appeared he wanted to keep us at arm’s length from the strongest emotions he has, while in interviews he has always been very good at deflecting questions that sought personal connections, whether it be to a failed relationship such as the one which preceded Sea Change, or his practise of Scientology.
“I could write something that would be very specific but I tend to try and chip away at the things that aren't quite as clear or simple,” he says. “Especially on this record where I was trying to get to the simplest ideas I could."
Asked what his state of mind was when writing this album and his response, after a long pause, involves the mechanics of deadlines and intense work, collaborators and practical decisions. As ever they are all external factors, maybe because he deflects by arguing that "you get into trouble sometimes trying to make grand statements”.
“Some people are probably good at it, but I find if there's a way to say it in a simple, offhand way, it works better than trying to find conversational directness. Sometimes if I’m asked to describe what it is I’m only going to make it less, I’ll only diminish it.”
Which is a reminder that the now “established truth” about Sea Change is that it was a break-up album while this album doesn’t appear to be hinged on one life change.
"I never said Sea Change was a breakup album,” he says. "I feel like you could listen to that album and its sounds like somebody in mourning, somebody who is taking stock of some kind of loss.”
While Morning Phase has an introspective sound it actually is more outward facing, more a guide to getting through than a report on what it feels like to hurt. Mornings can be the morning after but they can also be the starting over. Is he comfortable with the idea of being some kind of guide or advisor?
"I think on Sea Change I had these songs that were going deep into a feeling, a particular place - somebody who in a sense has been stripped of everything. Sometimes life asks of you to confront that and go through it. This one is maybe addressing certain difficulties of heartbreak, loss and dealing with negativity but there is a sense of trying to redeem or learn from it or appreciate what is there left,” the 43-year-old Hansen says.
“It's something I didn't manage to do on Sea Change because it was coming from a place of such anguish the songs never arrived to that redeeming place. Maybe in your 20s you're not looking for that because there is that sense you can start over but as time goes on, even when things go awry, I find that people are making the best of it. You can't just grab it all and throw it all away and it will rise again necessarily.”
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Beck with the Sydney Symphony plays
Sydney Opera House, May 7-9
Beck with Philharmonia Australia plays
Palais Theatre, Melbourne May 12-13
Tickets on sale from March 5
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