Beck

“Not really,” Beck says, taking a break between rehearsals for his Saturday Night Live performance to smash my hypothesis. “It’s not anything that I took on myself. They’re all just records, and I think Odelay was really successful here [in the U.S.], but Midnite Vultures was bigger in Europe. So it depends on who you’re talking to what would be the one to live up to,” he continues, knowing any talk of follow-ups is necessarily tied to market concerns. “Whatever that mentality is, I happened to hit some kind of mark. But there was never pressure on me. I’m just following more of an instinct about what I wanted to go out and play live and what I wanted to go into the studio and thought would be cool to put on a record. After Odelay, I was probably thinking of doing the opposite, to go from being the cut-it-up, sample guy to doing something completely live and do it in 14 days,” he says, referring to Mutations, the album that was so dissimilar to Odelay that Geffen refused to market it as the album’s follow-up.

For the last nine years, Beck hasn’t stopped to take credit for an album that represented a sea change in the way rockers approached music, as Odelay made computers and turntables safe for dudes with guitars. “I thought Radiohead inspired a lot of people in that way,” he says, changing the subject. “I do remember thinking with Mellow Gold and then Odelay that people’s reactions were kind of confused as to what we were doing. Some of those records were kicking around for years before they were released, so I sort of got an honest reaction that wasn’t based on what kind of success the records had. And I remember people being not really sure if it was real music or not,” he laughs, knowing just how unusual it is for an artist who broke through with an undeniable novelty hit (1994’s “Loser”) not only to survive his sophomore effort but to move millions of records in the process.

“In retrospect, I think that was a good thing,” he says of the bafflement with which his anti-folk and noise-rock constructions were received. “At the time, maybe it felt like we were wasting time and money and were childishly pursuing our own ideas and our own folly, and that was the feeling for me. If Odelay was going to be it, at least it would be kind of f---ed up, an interesting curiosity. It wouldn’t be the generic, trying-to-cash-in-on-the-right-sound-at-the-time kind of thing. It was funny at the time that people were buying it. I even forget all of the little interludes and half-formed ideas that we had thrown into it. But I don’t really know what other people take from it. I do know that I hear a lot of bad TV commercials that try to sound like [Odelay’s breakout hit] ‘Where It’s At.’ That pretty much turned me off from using the electric piano for a lot of years.”

Listening to Odelay today, it’s easy to re-experience that original bewilderment, as the album remains a gloriously noisy, disjointed affair, screeching electronics and creaking tape splices woven together into a surreal sonic patchwork. Stranger music never sold so well. If Guero is Beck’s sequel, it’s an entirely different animal, more cohesive, muscular and polished by far.

“Yeah … not polished,” he says, “but the experiments on there are incorporated into the songs instead of just tagged onto the end of the songs. Like, ‘Here’s a good jam. Let’s stick it at the end of this song!’” he laughs, recalling the Odelay sessions. “Another big difference to take into account is that at the time we recorded Odelay the technology had not evolved to the point that we could actually hear all of the tracks while we were making it. We didn’t actually know how the song sounded or what the transitions were like. Now ProTools and all that has evolved that you can pretty much hear everything, and it’s all instant. But back then it was kind of like working in the dark, so we actually didn’t know what the album sounded like until we went to a studio and put it on tape and mixed it.”

Though he seems far from comfortable declaring Guero as Odelay’s creative cousin, he admits they share more common ground than any of his albums. “It was pretty much the same,” he says of the seven-month recording process that birthed his eighth full-length. “The only difference is that it’s pretty much impossible to clear samples now. We had to stay away from samples as much as possible. The ones that we did use were just absolutely integral to the feeling or rhythm of the song. But, back then, it was basically me writing chord changes and melodies and stuff, and then endless records being scratched and little sounds coming off the turntable. Now it’s prohibitively difficult and expensive to justify your one weird little horn blare that happens for half of a second one time in a song and makes you give away 70 percent of the song and $50,000,” he laughs. “That’s where sampling has gone, and that’s why hip-hop sounds the way it does now.”