Beck's career has been defined—or maybe undefined—by his sonic hopscotch. He first reached the mass consciousness via 1994's "Loser," but only those paying closer attention realized that he released three albums that year: Mellow Gold got the major-label deal and the hip-hop/slacker-folk hits, while Stereopathetic Soulmanure went for lo-fi noise and One Foot In The Grave channeled warm, stripped folk and blues.
In recent years, Beck seemed comfortable alternating albums from the two sides of his personality: 1998's mostly spare, personal Mutations couldn't have been more different from 1999's space-funk-filled Midnite Vultures, and the monumentally beautiful Sea Change and 2005's Guero were similarly juxtaposed.
But something happened on the way to Guero, and it's even more evident in Beck's new The Information: His two sides have finally met in the studio. Hip-hop-influenced tracks mingle with folky rock songs, and lyrics about a "paranoid Jumbotron" sit next to serious-minded folkers. Though produced by Nigel Godrich, the man partially responsible for the somber sounds of Mutations and Sea Change as well as Radiohead's recent dark moments, the new album crackles with life. And, as usual, Beck is presenting more than music: The Information features do-it-yourself packaging—fans create the cover with a sticker sheet—and a DVD featuring homemade videos for each track. And when Beck and his band hit the road this year, they'll be accompanied by a group of look-alike puppets. Beck recently spoke with The A.V. Club about his new album, how he got here, and—very briefly—Scientology.
The A.V. Club: Preparing for this interview made me think of seeing you on 120 Minutes with Thurston Moore about 12 years ago; you goofed around and refused to answer questions.
Beck: I saw that recently. It's pretty amazing that that was on MTV. I remember it was at eight in the morning, just this ungodly hour to be on MTV. It was kind of scary and weird. It was very daunting; I just associated MTV with… I guess at that moment, it was sort of changing, but before that, it had been this bastion of hair-metal and teen-pop. It was right after Nirvana and Sonic Youth were getting on MTV; Thurston was up for some antics. There's some stuff we did that I think they took out: We bought some baseball bats and we had this idea that we were gonna get a phone call and we were gonna smash the phone with these baseball bats. I guess we did it too violently or something, so they took it out. I guess they were getting some heat from Beavis And Butt-head at the time; they didn't want kids to start taking baseball bats to phones. But it was good. We did that jam, Mike D [of Beastie Boys] and Thurston. It was definitely straight out of some Lower East Side coffeehouse activity.
AVC: Was disengaging at that point a defense mechanism after becoming famous so quickly?
B: I thought the whole thing was kind of a farce, so I just went with it. It was probably thinking that my music was not really any good. The other part was just growing up bored with TV, with five channels where nothing cool or weird ever happened. [Laughs.]
AVC: Do you still struggle with thinking your music isn't good, or have you grown out of that?
B: You never know if it's good. You can try. I think I've worked hard; there's some stuff that I think worked, with a lot of hard, hard work. I was 22 at the time, and I was kind of coming out of, not really a punk-rock scene, but a scene where bands would come out on stage in suits of armor and eviscerate 300 teddy bears or something. If somebody hands you the microphone, you've gotta do something.
AVC: It seems like The Information came out of nowhere; there were rumors a few months ago that you had a new album coming out, and those rumors had it pegged as a hip-hop album.
B: I don't know how it was billed, but I don't think it's a hip-hop record. There's four or five songs where I'm rapping, if you want to call it that. I think that impression came out because, before we did the record, Nigel said, "I wanna do a hip-hop record," which was the shock of all shocks. I've known Nigel for years, and we've made two records together. It emerged that his favorite works of mine were the hip-hop songs—which was completely baffling—and he was encouraging me to do something in that vein again. It had been a lot of years at that point.
AVC: So how different was it for you to go in and record this kind of music with Nigel after you'd recorded those more lush, personal songs with him?
B: This was a relief, because we'd done Mutations and Sea Change, and it was definitely time to do something completely different. We didn't even want to try to visit that territory again. We'd always messed around in the studio with stuff that was noisier and a little more reckless, but didn't fit in with those records. We'd always known that we wanted to do something where we weren't really constrained by the songs, and could just experiment more. I didn't really attempt to make the record have a sound. These songs are the work that's boiled down from about three or four times more music, so it's kind of the best of what we did in the last three years.
AVC: Why did this record take you three years to finish? And when you were writing Guero, how did you know which songs would be for which record?
B: They were conceived differently, completely and separately. I recorded all the music right at the beginning, the first week, and we spent a couple years turning them into songs. He went off to do Paul McCartney [Godrich produced McCartney's Chaos And Creation In The Backyard. —ed.] for a year, so I took that year to finish Guero, and then right around when he was finishing with McCartney, I toured Guero for 10 months. So when I finally finished touring and he was done with his other work, we got together and took stock of everything and put it all together. It was kind of a weird way to go about it, just sort of episodically working on the songs, but we got to have long periods of time away from it and get perspective, so ultimately I think it made the record better.
AVC: Are you bucking the system by putting out another record so quickly? You once said that you felt constrained by big labels' insistence on long lapses between albums.
B: I've tried ever since my first album to put out a record every year. This is probably the first time in a long time where I've succeeded. Guero was supposed to come out in '04, and then this record was gonna come out this spring. When I turned in Guero, they wanted to wait 'til the next year, so it sat around for a good 10 months, so that's kind of what made it seem like it's together. But originally, it was intended to be more spaced-out.
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