Anything goes. You always find interesting things that way.
Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother's face, her aspect and her attitude.
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.
Had there been no difficulties and no thorns in the way, then man would have been in his primitive state and no progress made in civilization and mental culture.
I did make some effort to bridge these two, Sea Change and Guero, a little bit. It's a difficult thing.
I did that Grammys thing - I did a little freeform poem.
I didn't want to do something typical.
I got sent to the principal's office many times for that record. It got a good reaction in Europe, but I ran into a lot of confusion here.
I got so involved in each thing I was doing. It's all over the place. I can imagine it being a little disconcerting.
I had an idea about doing a song about the neighborhood I grew up in as a teenager. It took a lot of years to put it together.
I had long hair when I was a teenager.
I hadn't done much rapping in a while. I really wasn't sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn't really required of me.
I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like Where It's At. That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.
I just go in the studio and write on the spot and see what comes out.
I 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 seemed like a good time to step back.
I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.
I think you have to keep a childlike quality to play music or make a record.
I wanted the guitar to sound like something off of a Howlin' Wolf record. There's something beautifully awkward about a sample.
I was coming from the school of home recording and stumbled into this guy Carl Stevenson, who I did Mellow Gold with. He was coming from the hip-hop world a bit.
I was thinking about bringing introspection on Sea Change and figuring out a way to make it work with break-beats.
I was trying to get the album done before the baby came, but he beat me to it. So he spent his first month in the studio with me. He was there a lot.
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.
I would love to do an electronic record. There's just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by.
I'm always recording. I'm always doing stuff. There are songs from Guero that were recorded five, six years ago.
I'm just taking one step at a time. I could zigzag one way, but it's not usually on purpose.
I'm the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don't have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere.
If someone is making a judgment when they don't have firsthand experience, it's intolerant. How can you make a judgment on something you don't know about?
If you have a wide range of taste, you're just going to gravitate in all directions.
In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs.
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.
In the past it seemed like I was 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.
In the studio, I'm always throwing people on different instruments.
It's difficult to put out albums on a more regular basis because of the way the record company works and the way promotion is, so creatively there a massive gulf.
It's pretty much impossible to clear samples now. The ones we did use were absolutely integral to the feeling or rhythm of the song.
It's really hard for me to commit, one way or the other. I was just always creating and seeing what came out.
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.
No one should drive a hard bargain with an artist.
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.
Sea Change was so specific. From the beginning it was set what it was going to be. All the other ideas that I had at the time I had to put to the side.
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.
The guys I was playing with for a lot of the '90s had all gone off to other bands, so I found myself, for the first time since Odelay, at square one, by myself.
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-a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is.
The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things.
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling 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.
There is something about playing with a group, but there's also something abut not having to explain stuff and just getting what you want.
There were songs I left off the album, real raggedy blues stuff, some electronic noisy stuff. It just didn't fit.
There's 40 or 50 songs that nobody's heard that I've done in between albums. There's a whole evolution from Midnite Vultures to Sea Change that's never been released.
There's never any pressure on the music having to be something.
There's some quality you get when you're not totally comfortable. When you're not doing what you're used to, you could completely fall on your face. You could completely blow it.
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 just makes that sound.
To me, it was like, if the world was going to end in 1999, which is what everyone was talking about, what would the time capsule be? So I was riffing off all the stuff that was happening at the time.
Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There's shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That's why I pay no mind.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
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 and they're like, I don't know about this one.
When I was making my four track tapes, I would make a bunch of cassette copies and take them down to the show that night and sell them. I'd maybe sell three copies, but you had that instantaneous feeling.
When it comes time to sing the vocal, 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.
When my nephew was 3 and 4, he would say the most genius things. He said, You're hammer macho with FBI dogs. I thought it was just one of those great lines.
When you work with somebody for a long period of time, you develop a shorthand with everything.
You can't please everybody. There's just as many people who probably don't want to hear something with a punch line in it.
You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There's only so much you can do with one record.
Beck's music video "Loser" was ranked #57 on VH1's 100 Greatest Videos.
Beck's music video "Loser" was ranked #64 on MTV's 100 Greatest Videos Ever Made.
Beck's album The Information gave Beck his third straight Top 10 studio album peak on the Billboard 200, reaching #7.
Beck's 2002 album Sea Change became his first U.S. Top 10 album, reaching # 8.
Beck's 1996 album Odelay received double-platinum status and earned an impressive number of industry awards, including two Grammys.
Both of Beck's parents are Scientologists.
A total of six of Beck's songs have been played on The O.C. - and all in one episode ( 215-The Mallpisode). They were "Girl," "E-Pro," "Que Onda Guero," "Scarecrow," "Missing," and "True Love Will Find You In The End."
Beck's song "Blackhole" was in the 2002 movie City of Ghosts.
Beck's song "The Golden Age" was on the series Six Feet Under.
His song "Lost Cause" was in the movie Along Came Polly.
His song "E-Pro" has been played on the show Entourage.
The song "Que Onda Guero" has been played on the TV show Entourage.
Beck's song "Strange Invitation" appears on the Just Like Heaven Soundtrack.
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