Brood On The Tracks

Of all the singer-songwriters since the late sixties to be saddled with the "new Dylan" tag, Beck Hansen seems the one most oddly suited to it. While competing contenders Bruce Springsteen and John Prine resemble Dylan superficially in both their lyrical approach and singing, Beck, like Dylan, switches gears much more dramatically. Even Neil Young, another chameleon, comes at the world from more or less the same angle no matter what style of music currently strikes his fancy. Certainly, many more subgenres of music have been born since Dylan himself cared enough to experiment, and Beck has found inspiration in nearly all of them. On 1994's Mellow Gold -- still his best record -- Beck fooled with rock, rap, folk, punk, country, and raga, and keyed them all to a wildly cascading verbiage that barely disguised the laments of a going nowhere loser sick of working for the man.

Beck didn't have to work for the man too much longer. After two independently released side projects, the former leaf-blower unleashed Odelay, a runaway critical and commercial success that birthed to the world his most famous incarnation: the funky weirdo. Though the album's gimmicky studio hooks generated far less warmth than Mellow Gold's homemade aesthetic, it still went on to win a Grammy, and most critics still consider it to be his artistic peak. Still, with that record, a little bit of the "real" Beck vanished into the grooves. Though no one could ever mistake Beck's verbal overspill for conventional singer-songwriter storytelling, Mellow Gold at least gives up some generational and autobiographical details that ground the songs in some context. On Odelay, Beck dodges anything resembling truth or meaning, and aims instead for surreal fun, getting crazy with the cheese whiz over the course of an entire hour long record. Very entertaining, to be sure -- but who's the man behind the curtain?

Sea Change, Beck's fifth record for DGC, jettisons his best known and loved persona completely, elects for the depressive rather than the manic, and trades a kitschy record inspired by the Gap Band (1999's Midnite Vultures) for a mopey record inspired by Leonard Cohen. Of course, this dewy-eyed sad-sack version of Beck shouldn't come as a total surprise. Odelay's followup, the autumnal acoustic outing Mutations, featured several songs that hinted at a dying relationship, the aftermath of which Sea Change supposedly details. Many claim Beck wrote these songs specifically about his 1999 breakup with longtime girlfriend Leigh Limon, and indeed, the album superficially appears to adopt what many have called a more confessional, autobiographical tone.

The real life Beck, however, is having none of it. After being asked by Blender's Dorian Lynskey whether he finds the new songs "personal," he categorically dismisses the idea: "The lyrics are in the tradition of songwriting that uses plain language." He also defensively resists any insinuation that his recent romantic travails inspired the new album's darker themes, prompting Lynskey to observe: "He must be the only American songwriter since Bob Dylan to write a beautifully moving heartbreak record, then seem perplexed, even annoyed, that anyone actually might be interested in the heartbreak behind it."

Ah yes, those Bob Dylan comparisons again. Like Lynskey, it seems that everyone wants to compare Sea Change to Dylan's 1975 classic Blood on the Tracks, and yes, on both albums, there are plenty of songs in which the artist reflects on a relationship's end -- at least one, maybe several. But that's where the similarities end. Blood on the Tracks had fire, spark, anger, humor, dignity; it told stories, spun yarns, and laughed as often as it wept. It was multi-dimensional. Sea Change is so unwavering in its despondency that it takes a few listenings to discern the few decent songs buried underneath the morose textures. Dylan begins his record with the upbeat classic "Tangled Up In Blue" as a way to ease the audience into more pensive numbers; Beck begins his with the bleary-eyed "The Golden Age," on which twinkling glockenspiel bells serve as the only lights on a lonely desert road. "These days I barely get by / I don't even try," he warbles, though he seems to have enough strength to soldier valiantly on to songs about tears that are lonesome, causes that are lost, and one with a hook that goes, "Cause it feels like I'm watching something die."

All of this may sound morbid, and perhaps even a little hackneyed, but except maybe for "Lonesome Tears," the over-orchestrated chorus of which sounds too much like someone standing on the edge of a cliff crying out to the heavens in very maudlin moment of existential despair, every song cited in the last paragraph is a good one. Though the orchestral arrangements make for the album's weakest moments, the quirkier, more left-field musical devices owe a bit to producer Nigel Godrich, who Beck claims banned the use of synthesizers during the recording of the album because he [Godrich] wanted a record that sounded distinct from Mutations. Many of the aural substitutes work magic: the gorgeous "Lost Cause," like many of Sea Change's songs, features the haunting bells of the glockenspiel. "End of the Day" utilizes an old style keyboard called a clavinet for its hook, and "Paper Tiger" calls upon David Campbell, Beck's father, to pen a swirling string arrangement that hypnotically weaves around his son's vocal. Unfortunately, the synthesizer moratorium also leads to some ungodly overdubbing: "Sunday Sun" and "Little One" both inaugurate a subgenre that can only be called "arena chamber pop." And then there's the Campbell-arranged "Round the Bend," which with its quivering strings bears so much resemblance to Nick Drake's "River Man," one must wonder if Beck is gunning for a Volkswagen Cabriolet commercial of his very own.

How far one is willing to go with the music probably boils down to personal taste, but what's truly baffling about Sea Change is that no one -- neither its supporters nor its debunkers -- have humored the idea that this record may be just as calculated as any record Beck has ever done. The evocative first lines of the record, "Put your hands on the wheel / Let the golden age begin," suggest that this "sea change" may be one in which the artist has control, rather than one that has occurred to him by circumstance. Without question, for someone reveling in the virtues of "plain language," there's still plenty of metaphoric imagery to go around: "Like a stray dog gone defective," "In a turnstile backwards we fly," "Loose change we could spend / Grinding down diamonds."

Not exactly the kind of thing a more straightforward troubadour like James Taylor would have penned; in fact, arranged differently, none of the songs in which those lines appear would have been out of place on Mutations. For although Beck's alt-world supporters would never admit it, Beck's mode of lyrical style isn't ironic at all -- it's surreal, which makes meaning a moot point. Sea Change isn't as willfully unreadable as Odelay, but it shares with Beck's previous work an obsession with distance, an avoidance of feeling. Regardless of what this album's boosters think, none of these songs bare the author's soul -- they merely describe emotions as defined by a dictionary, in a manner that seems more wistfully detached rather than truly heartfelt. Everybody knew that the songs on Blood on the Tracks weren't "really" about Dylan's life, but he invested so much passion and imagination into them, they felt like they could have been. By that token, those songs felt like they could have been about our lives, too. Here, when Beck sings that he feels like he's watching something die, it runs counter to just about every other rock and roll song, in which what's dying is something within the singer.

Certainly, the "real" Beck Hansen regrets the ending of his relationship with Leigh Limon, and he no doubt felt a great deal of pain because of it -- but even in its best moments, no pain, real or simulated, communicates itself through this record. Like Dylan, both the breakup mode and the singer-songwriter mode are just two more masks for Beck to put on, experiments that fail in much the same way the empty Midnite Vultures failed, albeit from different ends. Again, from the Blender interview: "I don't believe that one [emotion] tells more about a person than [another]. When somebody is crying, that's no better an indication of them than when they're laughing. They're all different pieces."

Perhaps, but an artist has to give a little of themselves, even if they have to imagine it all from scratch to do so. Wrapped in a mystery that seems too hollow to solve, Sea Change gives up nothing. Nothing wrong with a little brooding on the tracks, but Beck himself puts it best in another recent interview, this one to Chuck Klosterman of Spin: "Sometimes there is more resonance in a 99-cent store than in an existential void." Here's hoping next time, whether he tells the truth or makes up some good lies, he heads straight to the bargain section.

Chicago, IL
October 2002