FEATURE:
The Great American Songbook
Beck quite a bit. There is another reason to update any playlist I have previously published. Ride Lonesome was released in September. One of the albums of the year, I do want to pop in NME’s review for this incredible work. If you have not heard the album then please make sure you do. Masterful songwriting from one of the all-time greats:
“Last spring, Beck played two massive orchestral shows at London’s Royal Albert Hall. The setlist leaned heavily on his 2002 album ‘Sea Change’, a melancholic masterpiece adorned with gorgeous orchestral arrangements. Until these shows, the chameleonic indie-pop star had never performed the album with all the trimmings and, as he explained to the audience on the first night, he was thrilled at the opportunity to realise its songs with an 85-strong team of musicians.
At the time, he said that the concerts had inspired him to work in the studio with an orchestra – though stopped short of saying he was recording an album. Instead, in typically gnomic fashion, Beck described the endeavour as an “undisclosed, unnamed project”. 18 months later, here is the distinctly album-shaped ‘Ride Lonesome’, a 12-track collection of aching chamber pop tunes in the vein of ‘Sea Change’ and its 2014 spiritual sequel ‘Morning Phase’.
The result is a drop-dead gorgeous meditation on heartache and solitude, with the title track – and lead single – setting the tone for a suite of songs that is more spectral and ethereal than its predecessors. “You got to ride lonesome”, he sings over plaintive acoustic guitar on said title track. “You got to try to find the road… And follow it all the way home, alone”. This is the central thesis of ‘Ride Lonesome’. On ‘Falling Through My Hands’, a soothing lullaby wrapped around a gentle, looped guitar riff, he reflects on lost love with devastating directness: “I’m wanting you / But you’re falling through my hands this time”.
‘Ride Lonesome’ is the first album Beck has released since his divorce from Marissa Ribisi, to whom he was married for almost 15 years, was finalised in September 2021. They’d already split by the time he released 2019’s futuristic ‘Hyperspace’; if that album found him cresting the wave of this disruption, its successor is perhaps the sound of someone facing the reality of what lies ahead.
‘Sea Change’ was also released in the aftermath of a break-up, while ‘Morning Phase’ followed a career-threatening back injury. It’s striking that, in another time of upheaval, Beck has returned to the fold with the musicians who helped him make those records (Radiohead collaborator Nigel Godrich, who produced ‘Sea Change’, also mixed ‘Ride Lonesome’). For all the heartache, there is a seam of optimism and acceptance on a record that should offer succour to those who need it, too”.
On 11th December, Devil’s Haircut turns thirty. I am not sure whether I will write an anniversary feature around that. I did want to compile twenty golden Beck cuts for a mixtape, though. Taking us from his work in the 1990s to a couple of tracks from Ride Lonesome, it is hard whittling things down to twenty when it comes to this music legend. One of the most innovative artists, Beck always changes between albums. He can do something more eccentric and experimental but also produce these emotional and heartfelt albums. Nobody quite like him out there. This Los Angeles-born artist is one that I have been a fan of…
FOR decades.