The Word According to Beck

A lexicological guide to the very definition of a modern musical master.

Beck Time \bek tīm\: It's not like Miller Time. It's not even like "insert-name-of-teenager-here time": words uttered by exasperated dads the world over while waiting, engine running, for their mall-dwelling offspring to get in the car. Like shalom or aloha, "Beck Time" can be applied to any number of situations. The artist's reps may use it, for example, to explain the complications inherent in getting said talent on the phone, but ultimately it's an expression of the fact that Beck inhabits a different space entirely: Forget about quantifiable states of time—what we're talking about is a state of mind.

Much hyphenated heavy lifting has gone into documenting why the musician synonymous with the term cultural magpie is not like the rest of us. There's his fantastically arty family tree: Dad is bluegrass musician David Campbell (who has turned up on his son's records); his mom, Bibbe Hansen, used to hang with Andy Warhol; her father, Al Hansen, was a key player in the Fluxus movement—the '60s art community populated by such artists as Yoko Ono. There's his bohemian-underdog rise to fame on the back of the breakout slacker anthem "Loser"—which, expected by many to be the work of a one-hit wonder, catapulted him to fame as Foremost Genre-Bender of His Generation. And, of course, the elephant in the room—Beck's membership in the lousy-with-celebs church of Scientology. But on the occasion of the release of his new album—a '60s-Brit-rock-influenced record produced by Danger Mouse and, at press time, still untitled—and in anticipation of his appearance at August's Outside Lands festival, we got the opportunity to have a word or two with one of pop's most formidable monosyllabic talents. And when all was said and done, we couldn't help but notice that a few stuck out.

What made you decide to do an entire album with Brian Burton—aka Danger Mouse?
It was a convergence of the chemistry—whatever you want to call it. We hit it off. We both have a foot in different worlds. He works with hip-hop, but he's got that ear for indie rock and '60s rock and acid rock and heavy folk and electronics and all these things, so there's a commonality as far as what we're into.

Would you say it's a commenting-on-the-state-of-the-world album?
There was a balance we were trying to strike—somewhere between levity and gravity. It is commenting on something but not in a heavy-handed way. Anytime anything came off too "on the nose" or with too much import or gravity, it would just get thrown away.

This record [which clocks in at 30 minutes] is much shorter than some of your previous releases. Any reason?
I'm in a frame of mind to be concise ... and ... just get to what I want to say ... [long pause] ... or what I want to say musically. Maybe over time you become less precious with what you're doing. How do you say more with less? That's always the struggle. We were constantly trying to shorten things without killing them. By today's standards, the Beatles' "Eight Days a Week" [which ran 2 minutes and 43 seconds] would be a fragment of a song. And you don't miss anything. There's so much music out there. And you're asking a lot for people's time when you put out a batch of songs. You don't want to overstay your welcome.

A lot of your songs seem open to interpretation as autobiography.
I don't know if that's an American thing: We want somebody's blood on the song, so to speak. We want it right from them. Honestly, there's pieces of your life in there but ultimately it's still a song: It would be interesting to try to write something that's 100 percent autobiography, but I don't know that that's happened.

Your concerts are known for their showmanship—everything from a Will Ferrell cameo in a red spandex unitard to performances from the puppet masters behind Team America. What do you have up your sleeve for the Outside Lands Festival?
Right now I'm interested in just presenting the songs without a bunch of distractions. I just want to be there and play the music and have that unadorned, unornamented interaction with the audience. I've been into this idea of minimalism—to try to strip it back to something really basic but keep that pure.

Your acoustic performance in 2005 at Pancho Villa, in the Mission, has become a local legend. Were you getting a taco and suddenly decided to seize the moment?
We were playing a concert and some friends of mine were filming it, and [we] got the idea to go down [to Pancho Villa] and busk. I just got up there and waited my turn and played a few songs. It wasn't that alien to me, that feeling of getting up and nobody's really paying attention. That's what I knew for years, and that's where musicians come from. What we do is just a glorified version of that.

According to our sources, the resident mariachi was not enthused.
Oh, he was not happy. He was unhappy. I was not one of the regulars. I really would have had to have proven myself if I were going to make it a routine. It's territorial.

You once said in an interview that R. Kelly combines romance and unapologetic sexuality in a way that doesn't exist in rock music. Do you stand by that still?
R. Kelly keeps upping the ante, really. I mean, "Sex Planet"? There seems to be this duality of complete brazenness and absurdity and something genuinely heartfelt and soulful. In indie rock, it's very dangerous ground to add a tinge of absurdity to what you're doing. It immediately becomes suspect. You're not going to see Radiohead coming out dressed as fruit or rodeo cowboys or something.

Throughout your career, your music has often been linked to Prince's. Have you ever met him?
I haven't met Prince officially, but I was at a concert once [in the late '90s]. He was bringing people up on stage to dance—I don't remember what the song was, but he saw me and was pointing at me to come up. Everybody around me said "Get up there!" And I said, "There's no way I'm going up there." I had tennis shoes on, and I got shoved up there. And I think he wanted me to show him something and I just really ... I couldn't do much. The shoes I was wearing weren't the proper kind of shoes, unfortunately. Kind of hard to do the splits in running shoes. It doesn't work.

You've always been a strong proponent of the folk genre, and the Bay Area has been a breeding ground for its renaissance. Do you think the genre's latest incarnation has had its day, or is it still going strong?
I love what they do. Hopefully it will always have its place. I remember starting out playing folk music in the '80s, and it was so misunderstood. There was a palpable revulsion to anything "singer-songwriter." Any time I would play a Woody Guthrie song or even Hank Williams, the audience would start yelling "hee haw." They thought it was an SNL skit or something. You can thank Devendra and Joanna Newsom and Jack White and people like that for making that music valid again in the eyes of a younger audience. I get out my reel-to-reel eight track and record folk songs all the time. I look forward to putting out more music like that.

Your falsetto in "Debra" has become a sort of benchmark for falsettos in pop music.
You know, I really thought that that version on the record was just so tepid. The live versions were so much more intense and visceral, but I think the one on the record comes off as a little bit of a goof. It was probably two in the afternoon on a Tuesday. The only way that song works is if you go all the way with it. It needs a certain level of intensity that the album version doesn't have. I wouldn't think of it as a benchmark at all.

We'll have to agree to disagree. In that case, who is your falsetto role model?
When I wrote "Debra" in '95, I started out doing it because it just felt like the wrong thing to do—which can be a release. D'Angelo's record [Brown Sugar] came out right after that, and I was like, OK, that's the real thing right there. I stopped performing ["Debra"] a little bit after that. I just felt like after [Brown Sugar] came out I couldn't really do that song justice.

It's obvious that the aesthetics of your music are really important to you.
I think it's just my admiration for artists and having an excuse to interact with them in some way. I've been so lucky. I've gotten to work with everyone from Tim Hawkinson to Marcel Dzama. There's something in me that likes the idea that anybody going to Best Buy can buy a piece of Tim Hawkinson. I think it's important to have art out there and on the walls of Kmart or on a bus bench—all the places that these images for the record wind up. I've always thought it was a good excuse to sneak some of those things into areas they wouldn't penetrate otherwise. It's always felt like we were sneaking something through the door.

I read an interview where you talked about writing a particularly bluesy song for Guero and finding out that night that a good friend had passed away. Are you the sort of person who knows stuff before it happens?
Like one of those TV shows where they have telepathy? And the guy solves the mystery? No, nothing like that. Not to get too metaphysical or anything, but sometimes you don't know why you're writing a song and sometimes you realize later. My favorite songwriters—there's something that they're connected with which just happens to be with where people are at, at that moment. There's artists who seem to be a resonator for their time. It's a weird thing: Like, how do you know that that's what happens to be what people are thinking at that time?

After you toured with the Flaming Lips, Wayne Coyne had some less-than-flattering things to say about you publicly. In the blogs, there was some speculation about who would win between the two of you in a dance-off. Your prediction?
As far as a dance-off? I don't know. I think a slow dance would be nice. A nice, friendly slow dance.

You've talked about growing up and riding the bus in L.A. and how passengers would be singing the lines and doing the moves in unison to Grandmaster Flash. Are you sure that wasn't a Spike Lee joint?
That stuff happened, definitely. The bus would come up there from South Central, and there would sometimes be some West Texas bluesman in the back of the bus with his strap-on amplifier. I do wonder sometimes if I got that last glimpse of that old L.A., that Bukowski, sort-of-Kerouac, American, whatever-you-call-it L.A.

What are your thoughts on YouTube?
Up until the last five years, a lot of the people I knew were always trading videos and DVDs—whether it be a William Klein film or a Brigitte Bardot TV special—and now there's this library for everybody. But the hunt of it is gone, which is too bad in a way. You'd find a dub of that James Brown 1971 show live in Paris, just old beat-up, black-and-white footage—just amazing. There were these grails, and it would take years to find them. Something to be said for not getting it all at once, and having to discover things a little bit and search 'em out.

WEB EXCLUSIVE EXTRAS

Everyone is remarking on the album's '60s Brit Rock influence.
There is that thread there—that love of that kind of music. I tried to tone the diversity down—some of my records really vacillate between completely different genres, and this record doesn't. It holds together. But we knew early on [that] if that's all we did, it would kind of marginalize it and lessen the effect of the songwriting. We definitely reached farther than that.

You've talked about having a large archive of songs that you might release at some point. Anything in there that will definitely blow our minds—your "blue steel," as it were?
There are some interesting songs in there, definitely more experimental. I don’t know if the world needs them right now.

When you played the Download Festival, your band sat down at a fully stocked dinner table on stage, and played an amazing percussion section using their table settings for "Clap Hands." Is that the sort of thing that happens at dinner parties at your house?
Not lately. But it could, yeah. I had that idea for years and finally just insisted on it. I think [the band] was shaking their heads the whole time. Like, what the hell is this? But the first time we did it, it worked.

You worked with artist Jeremy Blake for the cover art on your album Sea Change. His tragic death last year really rocked the art world. How do you think back on him?
I knew Jeremy through Paul Thomas Anderson, and my sister-in-law works for the MOCA, and a lot of people had been telling me about his work. We met once, and he came up with the cover a day later and it all fell into place. I hadn't seen him in years, but ... the trajectory, where it eventually went, that was extremely sad. He’s definitely one of the most talented artists I've run into, and I've run into a few.

When you rereleased Odelay, Dave Eggers interviewed a group of kids who hadn't ever heard the album and used their reviews for the liner notes. How did that come about?
I asked him to write something, and he didn't want to be the "go-to liner notes man"—and I completely appreciate that—so he came up with this idea. Sometimes these anniversary editions can be gratuitous, and I think we were trying to find ways to make it ... the record's only 10 years old. It's not really deserving yet of being something that you do retrospectives on yet.

Amazingly, there hasn't been much that's been written about the origin of your name.
I'm trying to remember ...I  think I asked my parents once. Maybe it was Gaelic or something? I think that they found it in some '70s baby book that had all these freaky names. My name's actually Bek, but the 'c' got added as I got older. In school, they would always misspell it and I just left it eventually.

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