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Interview Podcast

Audio Beck
The Information

MP3: So, we're here to talk about some music, specifically your music and the new release that you've put out into the world, The Information. Beck : Yeah. Yeah. We've been listening to it nonstop for the past couple of days now. Oh, cool. And well, first of all, I'm just curious about the project itself because I understand that it was something that you had lurking in the background over the past few years. Yeah, it's been in our back pocket for a while. We've been playing these songs live for almost two years I guess, and they've been in various states of evolving, you know, slowly. And, yeah, so it's been a strange process on this record. Is it a little odd for you to take songs that you've been doing live and then recontextualize them for a recording? Well, we recorded, I mean, basically what you hear was recorded almost about three years ago and what we've been doing the last two years is, you know, I've been writing lyrics and melodies and adding various instruments and sounds and experimenting. We were taking a lot of the instrumentals that we've done and cutting them up and basically remixing them, putting them together. We did a lot of experimentation. We put all these songs on vinyl at one point and had a DJ bring in the turntables and just DJ the actual songs back into the recording. And, you know, there's just been all kinds of-- Permutations? Yeah, exactly. What you're describing is a Brion Gysin, William Burroughs cut-up approach to music. It's really fascinating. Did you know that this is what you wanted to do, that you wanted it to take such a long period of time, or was that just a matter of circumstance? You know, originally, we thought we were just going to work for about six weeks or two months and just generate a lot of ideas and it was all going be really quick and spontaneous. And that was the case, but I think we had just taken on more than we realized. And the reality of taking 40-odd pieces of music and turning that into something, a cohesive album, and figuring out what worked and what didn't, you know, it took a little bit longer and we were both doing things that we'd never done before. So, there was a lot of learning, and this was the first time Nigel [Godrich] has done anything--Nigel, the producer, has done anything resembling hip-hop, which I hate to call it that because it really isn't. But, you know, there was definitely a lot of trial and error, a lot of things we threw away--albums worth of stuff. I mean, it's actually painful sometimes to think of some of the songs that we threw away that we worked a week or two on. We wanted to sing those songs, but that's part of the process I guess. I think it's interesting what you said about Nigel not really doing anything, as you reluctantly said, hip-hop related. Because you've worked with him twice before, and those two projects are significantly different than this one. Yeah. What was the common ground or the concept that the two of you put together to follow on this record? Well, he didn't have any interest in doing anything like we'd done before. Because we'd already done it and it wasn't really of any point, you know. I had plenty of songs left over from Sea Change to do something in the vein of that record. We could have done that so easily, but he wanted to do something different and I had something very specific in mind that I'd--before we even recorded, before we even booked a studio or anything, I just delineated and laid out everything that I wanted to--this record to sound like and kind of gave a kind of verbal blueprint for it. So, it was very explicit from me what I wanted to do, and I think it's probably the first time that's really happened. Well, I guess that happened with Sea Change because I had all the songs written. It was kind of the feeling of the record and the sound was dictated by the songs that we had. But this record--how it sounds and how it feels was conceived before the songs were written, and that was an interesting way of going about it. If you don't mind my asking, what was that original concept in your mind? Well, it was a couple of years ago, so I only remember vaguely--so much has happened since then, you know. But I think I toured around the world at least three or four times since then and I've probably put in a couple of thousand hours in the studio. But from what I can remember, I wanted to do something where the rhythm, the drums were the most important thing. I wanted to try to do songs where it's all just drums and vocals. I wanted to strip back every aspect of the song that relates it to a genre or a time period, something where it is stripped down to such a basic level that you can't really call it retro or dance music or rock or, you know, whatever label gets put on. Did that involve some idea of what instrumentation you wanted to use? I mean, people have made an issue out of the fact that you used the Nanoloop program, the sequencing program, using that fabulous Game Boy sound. Did you have specific things that you wanted to put in? There were a few ideas. I mean, the basic idea was we were going to create this imaginary break beat library. In the sense that we weren't going to use old records, we were going to kind of create one, you know. So, we went in and we recorded with several drummers, bass players, guitar players, just a roomful of instruments rotating everybody and just recorded all the music live. And it was just an endless seven days of just laying down hours and hours of music, and we mixed it all as we went. So, we had to move quick and we had to commit to everything that we were doing. So, you didn't use any loops or anything outside of what you created in the studio? No. That's fantastic. Yeah. And rare today. It was a challenge. I think we're at a point where anybody can go and get a record and loop up a good beat and that's kind of been done, and it's part of the currency of production and part of the sound we're accustomed to. But to do it all but from scratch is a whole other thing and, you know, to Nigel's credit, I mean, he just got some amazing drum sounds. I think the art of getting that sound of those classic break beats is just a lost art. People record drums way too bright. They put too many microphones -- they don't record them in the right rooms, and we somehow, I think, through a lot of trial and error on Mutations and Sea Change we just figured it out, and that was the real trick of this record. That's kind of what we had in our favor, and I think what we get from that is that we're so accustomed to hearing a break beat, which is essentially a couple of seconds of music repeated over and over. In this series, it's live, so the beat is fluctuating, and the music's breathing and changing slightly. So, there is something more human. I don't know, there's something a little bit off about it, you know. Right. It's not as machinelike, which is--it's funny because we've just gotten a bunch of remixes done and I'm getting word back from some of the people remixing that they're having a really hard time fitting the vocals over their remixes. Oh, because it fluctuates with the rhythm. Yeah, nothing was done to a click, so the tempo is changing every couple of seconds. And I remember trying to rap over these things, and I've been rapping my whole life over a loop or a drum machine. That was very difficult, you know, starting a verse at one tempo and then halfway through the verse suddenly it speeds up. It was really tricky, but I think that's kind of--we wanted to get down to kind of something that was a bit more human I guess, a little bit more reckless, you know. My favorite example on the album is "Cell Phone's Dead." Oh, cool! I just think that song is--it definitely reaches into the inner-Meters-loving fans and what have you. And the one thing I'm really impressed with on the album is the sparseness of it. Oh, good. Yeah, I felt like that was what I was originally shooting for but we definitely got into bringing in other sounds, and it got more layered as time went on, as we worked on it more and more. But I think we really tried to tie our hands behind our backs a bit, not add too much, keep it as sparse as possible when we could. That's, for me I found that the hardest thing. To not overproduce what you're doing? Not necessarily overproduce it but just to leave space, let it be bare sometimes, let nothing happen sometimes. That took a lot of time to get to, you know, especially when you're starting out. You want to try everything. You want to put everything in there. It also seems with modern recording technology, people tend to forget that element of music. Yeah. I think there's a real fear these days of any kind of dead space, any kind of empty space, any point where somebody might possibly get bored. That was kind of what--that was the point of making these videos. We made all these videos ourselves that come with the record. I don't know--people who buy the record obviously see there's a DVD in there. We made the DVD in the studio over two nights. They're all--it's all just borrowed video cameras, cheaply done. We did it ourselves. We figured out the mixer and Final Cut Pro ourselves and, you know, it definitely shows. It's got this amateur quality to it, but I think that was kind of our reaction to years and years of being on TV shows where they have these cranes flying all over the place and trying to make everything look so interesting all the time. There's a terror that anybody is going to get bored and change the channel.

And this was all--we wanted to do something where--the shots last way too long. You actually see people looking away, you know, it's so obvious that there's an artifice there that we're dressed in costumes and we're on film. And we're wearing all these artifices on our sleeves and I think what you get in that is personality comes through 'cause that's the thing that gets lost on all those flying camera frames and production and lighting and whatnot that it really just becomes a showcase for the technicians doing it. It doesn't really give you a sense of the personality there that's being filmed or presented. I couldn't agree more and I applaud you for including the video because I feel all too often in our overmarketed music world that fans are not given a truly intimate insight into the artists that they love. Right. Yeah. They're forced to accept this sort of commercialized vision of them or, overproduced videos or what have you. Yeah. So, was this your concept to do this? Nigel and I, yeah. You know, it's something that we have seriously talked about, you know, while we would be eating take-out in the studio for months and months. I was pretty sure we wouldn't get around to it, but we had a few extra days in the studio at the end of recording, so we ended up doing it. And it worked as a get-together or a party for all the people who worked on the record and family and friends. So, it was kind of documenting everybody hearing the record for the first time. It was almost like a listening party or something because everyone who had played on the record hadn't heard what we'd done and heard the vocals where the songs went. So, it's funny sometimes looking back on the video as I see some of the musicians who played on it. You see them looking off to the side concentrating on, or some reaction. They're reacting to the music, hearing it for the first time. The artwork itself for the album, fantastic, just a blank slate with some stickers that were designed by artistic friends of yours? Yeah, some that I know; some that I don't. A lot of them were based in Europe. There's a design company called Big Active, who I've been following for years, and we're mutual admirers and I actually called them up for Guero. But they're out of London, so it was kind of hard to get a working relationship going on that record. But I had so much time in advance to start the artwork for this, so we contacted them about a year ago and our first conversation, within five minutes we had the entire concept for the package. It was just one of the things where you don't have to labor or come up with some idea. It just came out and now we just finished eight months of work to figure out how do you, how do you make [it] fit in a package, how do you, you know? How do you make what fit in a package? I'm sorry. Oh, how do you make stickers? How do you get them printed? And how do you get them to fit into a CD package? And just getting artists to commit to something like this. I mean, album budgets are pretty miniscule, so it was a real kind of a communal group effort. A lot of people came on just because they liked the idea and so it was something that really shouldn't have been able to happen, but-- Well, again, I loved the interactiveness of it in a way that's reminiscent of my childhood at least, sitting around pulling random stickers and placing them on a notebook. Yeah, I think everybody has that somewhere in their growing up and their adolescence, and it was--I've always collected stickers, actually. I have a huge drawer full of them, and I was never sure why I collected them. I just was attracted to them. Then, my son had just discovered stickers and so in my house if you stand on the same place long enough, you have a unicorn and an airplane and a rainbow on your jeans. And I think the guys at Big Active had the same thing and, yeah, it was really just an excuse for us to kind of indulge that-- Inner child. Yeah, that love of stickers that you had when you were kids. So, you've already are touring a lot, so-- Yeah, we're about five months into a tour right now. We're about to go out and do another five weeks. It's a little odd to have an album released in the midst of a tour. Yeah. I mean, it's an odd time. That's right. I said that at the beginning of the year. I said, "Don't we want to tour after the record comes out?" That wasn't--I think there's more of an interest in kind of getting out there and playing the music for people and sort of, I guess, building up some kind of something for when the record comes out. I think that's become more important somehow. I don't know. So does this mean that you're going to be infinitely touring? No, I don't plan it. I've been touring for about a year and a half now so I'm, you know, if you want to see the show, definitely come see it soon. I'm not doing the two-and-a-half-year tours like I did for Odelay or the Midnite Vultures, I'm definitely not interested in that. I'd rather make more records, you know. So, people don't need us to come through this city three times on one album, you know. It's just kind of not really any point. I noticed there was a press shot of you and Devendra Banhart. Yeah. We were doing a photo shoot and the idea was to just bring in a bunch of random characters. It's something that my friend and I have been talking about for a few years and we couldn't really get it together for Guero. She'd found this ranch house in the valley here in LA that somebody had sort of turned into a ranch-house version of Versailles. Just completely a suburban rococo, and this house was just incredible. I mean, just jaw-droppingly gaudy but kind of incredible. Like almost transcended architecture, it was really just an amazing place. And a bunch of people came down and he was friends of friends and some of his friends came down and-- Well, I only ask because we're up here in the Bay Area. Oh, right. And, you know, it just got me thinking about his appearance there and where your interests lie in contemporary music and what it is that fascinates you. I think there's a lot of good things right now. I'm not going to be able to list off a bunch of bands off the top of my head because I just shot a video the other night till six in the morning, so I'm a little out of it. But there's so many good bands and so much good music I actually...I relate to some of the music being made now more than when I was starting out. Well, it's interesting because I think a lot of what's become popular in some circles over the past few years is reminiscent of where you started with One Foot In the Grave. Yeah, that kind of a homemade kind of folk-blues kind of thing. Absolutely. I'm so happy about that 'cause I just--I met so much disdain for that side of my music and was constantly made to feel like it was inadequate and unprofessional. And I always thought of that music as having this kind of, something crude but, you know--I don't know, there's something I like about a kind of crude sound... And there's a modern way to approach it. You know, I think somehow you can take folk music and traditional blues and that kind of thing and do something new with it. But what I meant was, you know, people thought I was doing something ironic based on Hee Haw or they related the blues to a Budweiser commercial with the tumbleweed rolling down a dusty desert road, you know. So, I'm really happy about that--that, you know, some of these musicians and songwriters have reinvented it for people or have recontextualized it so that they can see those forms of music in a new way. Well, I sincerely appreciate your taking a little over a half an hour to talk to me. It's a pleasure. Good luck out there, and try not to overexert yourself. OK. See you. Bye bye.