YAHOO! MUSIC: The Dust Brothers produced this album. Was it the first time you'd recorded with them since Odelay?

 

BECK: We did two songs for Midnite Vultures, but it was very peripheral to the main work I was doing on that record. Just towards the end when I was mixing, we got together and did a couple of songs. And one of the songs we did was an old song from Odelay, "Debra." But we had a bunch of songs left over that we didn't use on Midnite Vultures, so two of those are on this record. So there's a slightly confusing history.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why did you decide to work with them again?

 

BECK: We'd been talking about it for years. I guess it was just timing. The last record kind of took me away on a fairly long tour, so that whole album [sea Change] took about two years of recording and touring and all that. We'd actually talked a couple years ago and were just trying to find time. But I think we didn't work as much in the late '90s because I was on tour all the time--there was a four-year period where I was just on tour constantly--and they were working on about four or five albums at once plus two or three soundtracks. I think it just finally got quiet, where we could all come together.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Would you say Guero is a return to the Odelay sound?

 

BECK: Well, you know, it is recorded eight years later. But I wasn't afraid of having it sound similar to Odelay, because that's a sound that we spent a solid year working on and finding. It's probably good timing too, because I think this is the first time in a while where I felt OK in having anything that related to that record.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why weren't you comfortable about it before?

 

BECK: I don't know, it's just a disease that musicians have--trying to get away from something that you've done.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Guero doesn't seem as sample-heavy as Odelay.

 

BECK: No, not really. But people would probably would be surprised that there aren't as many samples as they think on Odelay, either. We spent a lot of time trying to get things to sound like samples. I'd play guitar and play it like a loop, or how the "Where It's At" keyboard was played--I played that. People always ask, "Where'd you get that sample?" and I say, "We played it!" There's a lot of fun in sampling, and the sampling that we did do was a lot of fun and sparked a lot of creativity, but I think now it's a little bit prohibitive to sample. It's just so damn expensive, and it's such a hassle trying to clear things. As far as sampling goes, it's an interesting area these days, because it's definitely been dying out. It hasn't been arranged in a way where it's workable for musicians to do it. And compounding that, there are a lot of people who really abused it and gave it a bad name, by just taking people's entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy. So there are a few samples on this album, but it had to be something that was just so integral to the song. There's something interesting when you have a sample and then you have singing and other things over it. It becomes part of the glue of the song.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: So you again played instruments in a way to make them sound like a sample?

 

BECK: It's all pretty loose. I was really trying to keep things loose on this record where I could, where it made sense. There would be times when we worked before when I wanted the guitar to sound like something off of a Howlin' Wolf record. There's something beautifully awkward about a sample--the phrasing doesn't match the beat quite right, and it's maybe a little out of tune--so samples influence my playing in that way.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Were you writing in the studio?

 

BECK: Yeah. I did it the way I did it with Odelay: I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out. So when it comes time to sing the vocal, it's like, "OK, we need lyrics," and then I'll work on that for a while. I just mess with the songs. I'll sometimes write three or four songs over the drums and the bassline.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: So I assume there are lots of alternate versions of these songs floating around?

 

BECK: Oh yeah, absolutely. There are some songs that have eight different choruses! Some of them did work in a different way, but sometimes I'd think a song needed to be a little lighter, but then we'd try something else and I'd think it was too jokey. I had to find the middle ground.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: So it was important to you not to be too jokey this time?

 

BECK: I think so. I'll go there easily, and the Dust Brothers definitely encourage it. You know how it is when you've known someone forever--there's a lot of joking. Like, "Wouldn't it be funny if we did this?" But at the end of the day, I didn't want it to be one-dimensional. I definitely wanted to bring in some emotion and feeling from the last record in the midst of beats and vocoders and what have you.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Still, this album is pretty different from Sea Change, I must say...

 

BECK: Yeah, for that one I sat down with a piano and a guitar, and it was very singer-songwriter. Very basic.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: You're one of few artists who can play such different styles of music and get away with it.

 

BECK: I know! [laughs] It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I see musicians who have a [band] name for one thing they do, and then when they do their breakbeat thing it's called something else, and when they do their rock band it's another name, and when they do their electronic project it's called something else. But I never really thought about it. I was just always creating and seeing what came out, and I don't think I ever realized that there'd be such a discrepancy. I'd forget because I got so involved in each thing I was doing. But in retrospect, it's all over the place, and I can imagine it being a little disconcerting.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: You do make huge stylistic leaps between albums.

 

BECK: Yeah, and it gets harder and harder too, because there are albums in between there that don't get made. It's difficult to put out albums on a more regular basis just because of the way the record company works and the way promotion is, so creatively there a massive gulf, because there's also 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released: guitar stuff, weird punk stuff. So it's really weird creatively, because you get 10 or 12 songs every two or three years, and you want those songs to work as a whole; like, it wouldn't make sense to put a hip-hop song on Sea Change. There were songs I left off that album, too--real raggedy blues stuff, some electronic noisy stuff. It just didn't fit.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: So were you just chomping at the bit to get back to recording?

 

BECK: I was! With Sea Change I was planning to tour for just four or five months, but I ended up being out there for a while. And I took a few years before too. I kind of sat out a few years because I wasn't really sure what I wanted to do next. So many things were changing in music and in culture, so it just kind of seemed like a good time to step back. But I did have a backlog of ideas.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Where do you see yourself in the music scene now?

 

BECK: I have no idea! I really don't see myself anywhere.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: It's great that you're so unclassifiable that no one can describe anyone else's music as "this sounds like Beck." Because what does "sounds like Beck" even mean, exactly?

 

BECK: Yeah, even I don't know what that means!

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: I understand Jack White from the White Stripes guests on Guero--how did that come about?

 

BECK: Yeah, he played bass on "Go It Alone." He was in town and we were hanging out.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: How did you two hook up?

 

BECK: I did that Grammys thing--he wanted me to write a little speech for him at the Grammys when they played it, so I did a little freeform poem. Later he just came down to the studio and said, "I wanna play bass!" We messed around for a couple of nights.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why did he play bass? His own band doesn't even have bass in it.

 

BECK: He plays drums, bass, piano...that's the way I am in the studio too, and I'm always throwing people on different instruments. I was doing some recording last year and I had my keyboard player on percussion and guitar player on bass...kind of anything goes. You always find interesting things that way. Jack's a helluva bass player, by the way.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Sounds like there was a lot going on for this album.

 

BECK: There's a few moments when it gets a little thick, but actually most of the songs are pretty simple and stripped. The two songs that are the most dense are the ones that were from Midnite Vultures: "Earthquake Weather" and "Rental Car."

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Are there any other players of note on Guero?

 

BECK: It's pretty much me. This is the first time since Odelay where I'm playing most of the instruments. If someone were to say this album sounds similar to Odelay...well, it's the first time since Odelay where I'm playing most of the instruments, and that's the way I play bass and the way I play keyboards, and it just makes that sound.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Why did you go it alone this time around?

 

BECK: The guys that I was playing with for a lot of the '90s had all gone off to other bands, and one's a producer now and one moved to New York, so I kind of found myself, for the first time since Odelay, at square one, by myself. I did a bunch of solo tours last year and I'd gotten back into guitar playing and playing keyboards. I hadn't played keyboards in years. I'd really gotten out of the habit--I was being more of a frontperson. So this was great for me. I had a lot of fun, and it was just easy. There is something about playing with a group, but then there's also something abut not having to explain stuff and just getting right to what you want.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: So playing solo is easier overall?

 

BECK: Well, it is more time-consuming, which is why this record took five times longer than the last one. We worked on it for about five months, then we mixed it--or messed with it--a couple times.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Did you feel a sense of urgency to finish it and get it out?

 

BECK: I did. I was trying to get it done before the baby came, but then he beat me to it. So he spent his first month in the studio with me. He was there a lot. And then were trying to get it out for fall [2004], but decided to out it out the next year. So it'll be nice and saturated and full-bodied by the time it comes out.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: How did becoming a father and husband recently affect this album? Is that why this album is so much more upbeat than the last one?

 

BECK: I don't know. It definitely affected my life. I guess it gave it a nice feeling. A lot of the new songs were written, though, way before the baby--the seeds of the record, what the record was going to be. I think sometimes things in life take a few years to digest, and they find their way into the work later on. Sometimes I'm writing about things from eight years ago--they just took a long time to distill and come out in the appropriate way.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Did you try any new stuff, like new recording techniques or instrumentation, when making Guero?

 

BECK: Well, every time you go in, it's like starting over. You don't know how you did the other records. You're learning all over. It's some weird musician amnesia--or maybe the road wipes it out. You have to find it again. One thing is, I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that anymore. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It didn't really seem like I needed to do that. It wasn't really required of me. At first I didn't know what I wanted to do with it, because I didn't want to do something typical--like, I think times in the past it seemed like I was kind of making fun of rap a little bit. But it was more me making fun of myself, since I'm not technically a rapper, whatever that means--I'm not from the "Academy Of Rapping." So I think this album was more just doing some things I hadn't done in a while, walking a little bit different in some of the old clothes.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Did you find you have different audiences for your different styles of music--like do you have a "folk" audience for one album and a "hip-hop" audience for another?

 

BECK: Definitely. You see them at the shows. We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play "Lost Cause" or something and they're like, "I don't know about this one." It's all over the place.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: How do you think you've had the luxury to experiment like that? Most major-label artists don't have that freedom.

 

BECK: Just ignorance! Pure ignorance. Bit by bit I'm becoming more aware of it, but in the past I was completely unaware that people would listen to my records and have some kind of idea of what I was and have a certain expectation. I was just seeing what came out, trying anything. The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have, where they have a real specific idea of what they are and what their sound is, and how they can't do certain things because their fans won't understand it. I didn't have that at all--I had the opposite. But if you have a wide range of taste, you're just going to gravitate in all directions.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Any other styles or genres you'd like to explore?

 

BECK: I would love to do an electronic record. I've been calling up Richard James [aka the Aphex Twin] for about six years now, trying to get him to do something with me. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by. The artists that I've really admired were filmmakers, and filmmakers are allowed to jump from genre to genre. So I identify with them more than with how a musician is supposed to behave artistically.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: You say you've become gradually aware that the public has certain expectations of artists. What do you think people's expectations were for this album? Like, did they want another Odelay? Another Sea Change?

 

BECK: Well, I know that after Midnite Vultures I began to feel like people were wanting something with a little more depth. Midnite Vultures had a lot of goofiness and I had a good time with that, but when I got around to doing Sea Change, it definitely felt like something that was needed.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Were you making a conscious effort to be more serious on Guero too?

 

BECK: Not serious, just trying to make it a little more three-dimensional. Some songs could be fun, but others could have aspects that were a little darker. Definitely playing with both and putting them together.

 

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: From Midnite Vultures to Sea Change was definitely your biggest stylistic leap.

 

BECK: Yeah. This time, I did make some effort to bridge these two [sea Change and Guero] a little bit. I remember talking to a friend of mine and he was saying, "You know, if there's some way you can channel [the vulnerability and emotion of Sea Change] into the next album..." And I told him I was going to do my best. It's a difficult thing. Music with beats and hip-hop elements is good-time music, you know? So you start putting heavier concepts over it and it starts to get a little crooked and off-balance. But it was definitely something I wanted to try.

 

YAHOO! MUSIC: Is this at all because you got some critical flak for Midnite Vultures?

 

BECK: Oh, yeah! I got reprimanded. I got sent to the principal's office many times for that record. It got a good reaction in Europe, but felt like I ran into a lot of confusion here. I thought of the whole thing as a satire--one of the titles I was thinking of for the album was Satiricon. To me, it was like, if the world was going to end in 1999, which is what everyone was talking about at the time, what would the time capsule be? So I was riffing off all the stuff that was happening at the time. I wanted it to sound like Captain Beefheart produced by Puff Daddy. That was my grand concept. But I think people didn't get it!

I hate to say it, but the Pitchfork review of Guero pretty much nails it, from the description of Beck's career to the real value of his latest album. "E-Pro" is a nice song, but I think my favorite song is the Boards of Canada remix of "Broken Drum" and it's only on the deluxe version of the album. It's like Odelay Ultra - no carbs, no bark, no bite.

I'm not really familiar with Beck's work, but I know that "Everybody's Gotta Learn Sometimes" from the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Soundtrack is a marvelous song.

If you like that, you should check out Sea Change, as that album has a lot of the same sound and lyrics.