A Resounding Yet Controversial Success: Beck’s Morning Phase 10 Years Later

It is the winter of 2014 and, despite ongoing efforts to negate the tragedy of the thing, I am 12 years old. I hear a new single on the radio. I freak the hell out. No matter how old you were when you first heard Beck’s “Blue Moon,” I struggle to believe your reaction could have been far different. The single, as well the album which houses it, Morning Phase, carried me through a definitively heinous period of adolescent nihilism. Beck’s mid-decade revelation was a spacious, meditative collection of mantras and reckonings, a refusal to give up on a world which burns and sparkles around the middle-aged, multivalent songster. The selfsame album inspired me in more ways than one: For an unfortunate six-month period following its release, I was compelled to wear a floppy wide-brim felt fedora and carry around a clunky Nikon on a padded neck strap as I plowed through the streets of New York in a pair of polka-dotted Keds, à la the Beckian man-twee vibe of the era. If asked about this in public, reader, I will deny it vehemently, but know that it is true. There are (copious) photoshoots to prove it.

Beck might have needed Morning Phase as much as I did, though he couldn’t have expressed it with the same sartorial flair. The indie mogul suffered a devastating spinal injury on the set of the “E-Pro” music video off 2005’s Guero, one which would hinder his playing abilities and force him to nearly abandon touring altogether. During that time, the singer dabbled in producing and helped other artists with their work and release two more albums himself, The Information and the severely underrated Modern Guilt. Morning Phase, though, was his resurgence—a proud, self-controlled announcement of the artist’s recovery and re-entry into the music world after a six-year absence. It was received with requisite awe by its audience and immediate acclaim, debuting at #3 on the Billboard 200 and scooping up five Grammy nominations.

That same year, Beyoncé was on a streak of her own. Her self-titled album, sneakily released in December 2013, was a sexy, feminist triumph—replete with genre-defining visuals and silky-smooth production. It was the favorite for Album of the Year, until Morning Phase beat it out in a shocking upset. It had been declared the year’s best work, also knocking out Pharrell’s Girl, Ed Sheeran’s X and Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour—not to mention commercial successes like Eminem’s The Marshall Mathers LP 2 and Ariana Grande’s My Everything, both of which failed to even make it on the nomination ballot. Morning Phase rose victorious from a year dominated by bouncing pop and silken R&B.

This is not to say the album came without its criticisms. Many outlets viewed it as the younger, shyer cousin of his breakthrough 2001 album Sea Change. Pitchfork essentially stated as much in its review, granting Morning Phase a shrugging 6.8. Fans and critics alike bemoaned its defeat of Beyoncé—Kanye West even jokingly stormed the stage at the announcement of Beck’s win, causing a jolt of Swiftie-PTSD. An outlet called “Bearded Gentlemen Music” noted that “Morning Phase [sic] sounds exactly like Sea Change, but nowhere near as good.” To the aforementioned gentlemen, I say: Shut up. The notion that an artist cannot succeed twice within a genre is both tedious and incorrect. Moreover, the growth Beck experienced—both musically and personally—between the two albums is a manifest. Morning Phase’s composition is simultaneously more confident and more contained; it is gentle and pensive, where Sea Change veers youthful and fraught. Its overtures arrive grander and sharper, its vocals deeper and unwavering.

But I am not here today to throw my hat in the ring of the great Morning Phase vs. Sea Change debate—nor the far scarier Morning Phase vs. Beyoncé argument. I love “XO” too much, anyway. And Sea Change might actually be an album built more for me: an emotionally-garbled 20-something with the blazing trash heap of romantic relationships appropriate for the age. Sea Change is a heartbreak album—depressing and desperate and nihilistic. Morning Phase—in a turn that will shock music-lovers who believe that an artist can only sing about one thing throughout their multi-decade career—is not. Instead, it is a tale of revival and rebirth. Night falls on the album at times, but the dawn always shines through, and it always will.

Morning Phase’s themes shine through its very, very 2014, stomp-clap-esque cover with just a hint of psychedelia: Beck, donning a scratchy wool sweater and a near-replica of the felt fedora I so cherished, inhales pensively, chin upturned, as he gazes with serene pause at his listener. An unbelievable number of lens flares criss-cross the cover—which is itself framed in an oh-so mid-decade white border—suggesting a billion morning rays drape over Beck’s golden tresses. The album’s first song, “Cycle,” is an ascendant instrumental, crescendoing strings pulsating toward something sacred and intangible.

“Cycle” flows unerringly into “Morning,” the album’s first vocal track and one of its greatest overall. Soft, undulating guitar strums and piano plunks buoy Beck’s first affirmation: “Woke up this morning, found a love light in the storm,” he calls, painting a love not lost, but misplaced. “Can we start it all over again? Won’t you show me the way it used to be?” This question remains unanswered as the song twinkles to an end—but, by the album’s conclusion, it will be answered with a resounding affirmative.

For all of its own moments of resurrection, Morning Phase is not without its moments of loss. On “Say Goodbye,” a bluesy fingerpicking song, the relatively innocuous “These are the words we use to say goodbye” is transfigured into “These are the words you use to say goodbye,” leaving a lump in Beck’s throat as the refrain recycles. “Wave,” one of the album’s more experimental moments, spends its latter half repeating the words “wave” and “isolation” as a dramatic mise en scène of isolated strings cuts ornately beneath. In fact, there is a new-wave orchestral bent to several songs on Morning Phase that, when sewn seamlessly into the gentle acoustic thrum of the album, differentiates it from any of Beck’s earlier efforts.

And then, there are the moments of pure Beckian grandeur. “Blue Moon,” the aforementioned single I’ve long held tight, was the only song I listened to for months after its release. “I’m so tired of being alone / These penitent walls are all I’ve known,” the singer croons defiantly above a bed of twinkling strings and homey guitar chords. A monster chorus ooh’s build into a flaring shout of hopeful vulnerability—unlike the moper of Sea Change, the funkified sensuality of Midnite Vultures or the avant-garde experimentalist of Guero. Pure openness accompanies practiced self-restraint, the kind that only comes after decades of painful absence. The emperor wears no clothes, but he didn’t mean to put any on.

“Unforgiven” is similarly stripped down, with the same calm transposed onto a resigned background rather than a triumphant one. “Somewhere unforgiven / I will wait for you,” Beck sighs, owning up to his erring and promising not to stop it. “Country Down,” a gorgeous, roiling tune, traces the shattering of an idyllic yesteryear—as whispering pianos and twanging guitars ride the stream of its rhythm: “Reaching for sunlight, can’t see it anymore,” Beck croons, “The hills roll out like centuries / Pass by without a sound.” There is a practiced remove on Morning Phase which Sea Change lacks—perhaps intentionally. Nevertheless, the album marked a new era for Beck, and distinguished Morning Phase from his previous emotional feats. In the years since, Beck has released two records, 2017’s Colors and 2019’s collaborative effort with Pharrell, Hyperspace. Neither project has grasped even obliquely at the weight of Morning Phase’s talent, nor the massive acclaim it garnered.

Morning Phase might not be Beck’s best album—it is unproductive to mark it against Sea Change, Odelay or Midnight Vultures—and it is not Beck’s most daring, nor his most successful. It is without the soul-firing beeps and boops of his electronic work, the fits and starts of his more experimental tracklists. But, as a capstone to a three-decade career—at least, I’d like to imagine it as such—it is impeccable, mature, calm and centered; the album is bright and deep and far-reaching, the focal point of years and years of wonderful music that did not get the attention it deserved, a refusal to give up and a belief in a better tomorrow. It is the Grammy Award finally won, an apex finally touched. It is patient, collected, smooth and, in a quiet, soft way, a measure of genius.

And this genius is found, I think, in that aforementioned remove’s countervailing force; that is, in the unbridled, self-knowing hope which pulses through the album’s undercurrents, emerging triumphantly at its close. In “Waking Light,” the expansive apex of the record, Beck voices his victory cry: “Night is gone, long way turning.” The song reads like a sermon, replete with explosive instrumentals and staggering crescendos. “When the morning comes to meet you,” Beck implores—not if, but when—“Open your eyes with waking light.” A swell of electronic guitar crests and distorted vocals crest the album to its finish, sparkling out of being soon after they arrive. Twinkling piano notes embrace each other, rising into a softly-fading rise and a cheekily-unplugged amp. Beck slinks off-stage as quickly as he’s come, leaving the listener with his refrain beating in their chest. Night is gone, indeed.

Miranda Wollen lives in New York and attends school in Connecticut, but you can find her online @mirandakwollen.