In honor of Beck’s upcoming new record Ride Lonesome which comes out this Friday, I thought I’d do a quick revisit of my favorite album of his, 2002’s Sea Change. It’s aptly named; after the quirky Odelay, the meandering Mutations, and the funky Midnite Vultures, he goes through a bitter breakup, completely changes direction, and comes out with a deeply personal and contemplative record that defies anything he’s done before. It’s my top favorite of all his albums and the one I return to the most. I’ve mentioned several times that it’s also tagged as a Mendaihu Universe Legacy Soundtrack, having been played constantly during the writing of the Bridgetown Trilogy.
He made several music videos for this album even though there were no official singles, and they complement the album’s themes of emotional loss and eventual healing.
He pulls no punches right from the start: the opener “The Golden Age” sets the stage as a night-time drive, perhaps a long dark night of the soul: Put your hands on the wheel, let the golden age begin / The window down, feel the moonlight on your skin / Desert wind cool your aching head / The weight of the world drift away instead. There’s a lot to work through, and it’s not going to be easy.
That pain continues through “Paper Tiger”, a string-laden piece (conducted by his father David Campbell) that feels very much like an old blues track. Here we start hearing more nuances in the album’s production (the always amazing Nigel Godrich), with phased vocals and the use of that slow-build style I love so much.
Eventually he comes around — sort of — with the somber “Guess I’m Doing Fine”, which is obviously not the case but at least he’s trying to find a way through it all. The video has him walking around various parts of Los Angeles, including several scenes in Echo Park, with a ghostly acoustic guitar following his every move. Eventually he befriends a local and they start talking about life. Their conversation is unknown, but the setup underscores the whole point of the song: the only way to get better is to work towards it.
It’s a tough road ahead, working through the anger of “Lonesome Tears” and the self-effacing “Lost Cause” until we hit the exhaustion of “End of the Day”. It all starts building up until it finally spills out with the adversarial “It’s All in Your Mind”, which, interestingly, was originally a lo-fi single released years before (just before Odelay), but it fits in well here.
It’s followed up by the somber and mercurial “Round the Bend” — he’s finally accepted this grief, and starts the healing. It’s followed by “Already Dead’, in which he faces everything that’s left and gone away. What’s left is what needs working on: “Sunday Sun” focuses on acceptance and moving on.
In its own way, the penultimate track “Little One” underscores that acceptance, that what is done is done and you can’t get it back. But like the video, it also focuses on what’s only seen in dreams and hopes: a clearer future of healing. A waking up from the nightmare, exhausted and feeling out of place, yet seeing a clearer path ahead. The album closes with the quiet yet uplifting “Side of the Road”, a reminder of what we’ve gone through and what we might encounter next.
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Interestingly, I passed on picking this album up for a few months when it dropped back in September of 2002, as I hadn’t been the biggest fan of Midnite Vultures and hadn’t really heard anything from this one. It wasn’t until I happened to hear a few songs during one of my frequent stops at the Newbury Comics in downtown Amherst that it finally clicked, and I was immediately sold. By year’s end I was playing it constantly during my writing sessions. It was a perfect soundtrack that aurally fit the moods and setting of the more somber sequences of the trilogy.
Twelve years and several albums later, Beck revisited this quieter style with the equally brilliant Morning Phase in February of 2014. And his newest, Ride Lonesome, has been described as the third in this series. While Beck has already been seen as a master in writing catchy yet offbeat (and often bizarre) alternative pop singles with quirky lyrics and creative production, with these albums he proves that he can also write deeply personal and heartfelt ballads that work themselves deep into your psyche.
[NOTE: This was originally a LiveJournal post of mine from 11 September 2013, and lightly edited. The above playlist is missing only two songs — one was my own, and another is linked below.]
I was working at Yankee Candle that day, and I’ve already posted about what I did, what I felt, and so on. We all have at some point or another. One thing I rarely about, however, is how I got through all of it on a personal level.
Those of you who know me already understand that I’m an obsessive music nerd. I may not have a degree in it, but I’ve been collecting and listening to music since I was a wee kid. I’ve also made mixtapes since I started taping stuff off the radio, and started making my own real mixes around 1988. These mixes often reflected the mood I was in at the time and became a way for me to sort out those emotions and thoughts on my own.
In 1991 I created a compilation called Desert Storm: Sailboats of Ice on the Desert Sand, a highly-charged mix that reflected my anti-war feelings at the time. Considering I was a sophomore in college at the time, one can understand that this particular playlist might be a bit overwrought and self-righteous (Ending with Barry McGuire’s “Eve of Destruction”? How heavy-handed can I possibly get?), but it seemed to help me get over the anger and confusion I felt at the time.
A bit over ten years later, and exactly ten days after the events in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington DC, I put together another compilation to help me sort things out. I needed to put things in some sort of order so I could process what happened then, what some may have felt, and what might come next. I had to do this on my own, with no outside influence. I knew that if I followed the news I’d get overwhelmed; if I read the pundits, I’d only get pissed off; if I reacted to emotion and wished for vengeance, then I wouldn’t be true to myself.
I had to process this in my own way, and music, as ever, helped me through it.
1. Albinoni/Giazotto, comp. ‘Adagio in G Minor’ Certainly, some may connect this track to the more dramatic movie themes — or if you’re me, connect it to the first track of Sigue Sigue Sputnik’s Dress for Excess album — but this was actually a connection from a Best Classical Album in the World Ever cd I got from back in my HMV days a few years previous. I listen to this track for what it is; a quiet yet stunning piece of neo-Baroque music that serves to set the scene. In my head, I pictured the sun coming up, the start of a lovely and clear day, maybe even somewhat hot and muggy. There’s a sense of…something, underneath it all, however. One of those feelings of tension but you’re not entirely sure where it came from.
2. Jars of Clay, “Crazy Times” Everyday stress. A long and frustrating commute. Driving into the city, or taking the train in, or maybe even like me, taking that back road in the pre-morning darkness towards your destination, coffee in the cupholder, contemplating why you’re even up and in this situation. Nothing inherently bad…just temporarily finding yourself in a situation or place that you’d rather not be in, fully knowing that you’d be free of it eventually.
3. Radiohead, “Street Spirit (Fade Out)” Tension spills over as we get to our destination. It’s another Tuesday workday, and you’d rather still be in bed, even though you’re wide awake, already on your second coffee, and really need to get that project done today. For a brief moment you’re wondering why you’re even here at this job…it’s okay, it pays the bills, but does it make you happy? What do you really want to do? Can you even do it at this point, or do you have to wait another few years and save up? Shit…well, you can’t really think about it right now, can you? Almost time for that team meeting. May as well get it over with.
4. Live, “Overcome” 8:46am ET. “OK. What the fuck just happened…?”
5. The Cure, “All Cats Are Grey” 9:03am ET. “Oh. Oh, shit.” 9:37am ET. “What the fuck is going on…???” 10:03am ET. “…”
6. Nine Inch Nails, “We’re in This Together” 9:58am ET. The South Tower collapses. 10:28am ET. The North Tower collapses. The first song I thought of as soon as the news had been sent my way. I immediately thought of all those people in the Towers, unable to escape. The people on the planes with no way of escaping. The commuters and the pedestrians below, scrambling to get the fuck out of the area as fast as they could. Tension built up to dangerous levels, where fight or flight kicks in. Where fear feeds or kills. And despite it all, somehow still having that choice whether to live or die, to endure or break.
7. Ciccone Youth, “(Silence)” Just…silence, as we sit there, staring in disbelief.
8. Pulusha, “Isolation, Part 1” Everything slowly starts to sink in. We see what we’ve witnessed on the TV, what we’ve heard over the radio, what our friends, our relatives, complete strangers have been telling us. We start processing what happened. Two skyscrapers that many people have known for most of their lives are reduced to rubble. A section of a major government building in ruins. Thousands of people killed. All other planes are accounted for, aside from those four. Some of us know victims, others only hear of them. It’s hard, but we finally let ourselves accept what just happened.
9. The Flying Bohemians, “Intro/Sodabottle” This is something I’d recorded myself in the summer of 1995. It’s a shortish instrumental played on guitar through flanger and delay, using a soda bottle as a slide (as well as invoking a trippy sound — the title was partly inspired by a college friend who’d made a working bong out of a plastic 7-Up bottle). This is the moment where I’m told by my boss of what exactly happened and the aftermath, and I’m left speechless. I head out to the smoker’s table out back and proceed to light up at least four cigarettes in a row, staring up at the now empty sky. Our warehouse was right under a major flight path for planes out of Boston. I let it hit me fully and completely, just so I could process it all.
10. Manic Street Preachers, “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” “Let’s go get those motherfuckers!” “Kill those shitstains, whoever they are!” “Goddamn Muslims!” “Bomb the fuck out of Afghanistan!” “Oh, you have messed with THE WRONG FUCKING PEOPLE.” “USA! USA! USA! USA!” “Kill ’em all!” “Those fuckers are gonna eat lead!” “Those bastards are gonna fucking DIE.” “Give me a goddamn gun, I’m gonna head over there and do it myself if I have to.” “NOBODY fucks with America.”
Jesus, the fucking noise that came after that silence…
11. Failure, “Daylight” Some of us wanted to go out and kill the bastards. Some of us wanted to hide from the world until it blew over. Some of us wanted to detach ourselves just enough so we could think clearly. Some of us wanted to know why these events happened. Some of us just…wanted it to be over, just so we could let the healing begin.
12. Temple of the Dog, “Hunger Strike” By that afternoon, we were all exhausted. We’d bled our emotions dry for the day, leaving us empty. Calmer minds started turning towards the rescue efforts, the security checkpoints, the vigilance of the police, fire departments, FBI agents, the doctors and nurses, everyone from triage up to commanders and commissioners. They kept watch over everything and everyone, often at the risk of their own health and sanity. And for a brief moment, we stopped being hateful towards each other.
13. Jeff Buckley, “Hallelujah” This song was everywhere that day. Leonard Cohen’s brilliant elegy of perseverance and reconciliation when the world is utterly fucked up beyond fixing seeped into the country’s psyche with Buckley’s sparse and haunting version. We would heal from this. Hopefully.
14. Radiohead, “You and Whose Army?” Cooler heads finally prevailed, after all the noise died down. We would eventually find and capture–or even kill–the ones who had done this, but we weren’t about to go in guns blazing…at least not yet, anyway. We were still angry and in pain, and we wanted revenge…but many of us felt we could trust those trained to do so–the Armed Forces, the FBI, those in charge–to eventually put this all to rest. We were quiet…but we wouldn’t forget these events, not for a long while.
In retrospect, this didn’t quite unfold the way we wanted or expected — I will spare you the diatribe on that — but slowly, eventually, we found Osama bin Laden and many of his cronies. [EDIT: Twenty-five years later and sadly the day continues to be turned into patriotic porn for the conservative wing while the rest of us are trying to heal and move on.]
15. U2, “Mothers of the Disappeared” Originally a song about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, this song was my own personal tribute to those we lost that day. That’s what I try to remember. Not the violence, not the revenge, not the anger…but the loss. How easy it was to erase a life, and how easy it still is to use that loss as an excuse to further fuel blind hate.
16. Chet Atkins w/ Mark Knopfler, “Imagine” I will freely admit that I am liberal, but in my own way. I will also admit to wanting peace over war if at all possible. On the flipside, though I dislike war, I understand it as an inevitability if and when it happens. I fully admit and embrace this paradox because it’s who I am. I will never be a part of a war as I refuse to take the life of another person for any reason, but I have come to accept that the world is an incomplete, fallible place where things disintegrate and events unfold to cause war. I’ve seen and read about uprisings and revolutions, I’ve witnessed and read about pre-emptive strikes, I’ve read about the after-effects of these things. We’re constantly evolving, and that doesn’t necessarily mean only in a positive direction. Things change whether we want them to or not.
At the end of the day, however, it would be nice to see a day where we can meet in peace, not in animosity.
While I’m on the subjects of the HMV years, writing The Phoenix Effect and favorite albums from 1998, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another album that even more play in the back room of the store and especially during my writing sessions.
Most of you already know their popular hit “Counting Blue Cars” from 1995’s Pet Your Friends album, which got considerable play on radio and MTV at the start of 1996. It still gets play now and again (and shows up on the music loop at my day job), sadly they were treated as a one hit wonder soon after.
Which is too bad, because their sophomore record, And You Think You Know What Life’s About, finds the band with an edge and looking to expand their sound. As a member comments in the promo video found on the CD itself, after playing on the road for several months, they found themselves playing harder and stronger, spilling even more of their emotions and strength into their instruments than before, and it shows on this album. They holed up in the hills of Santa Barbara and came out with one hell of a great record that sadly got too easily dismissed by jaded critics expecting another “Blue Cars”. And to add insult to injury, the UNI/PolyGram merger that year pretty much dried up any promotion or support they’d had before.
Right off the bat it kicks off with “Stay Awake”, bashing drums and chunky noisy guitars, slapping you in the face to get your attention. This isn’t going to be your typical mid-90s radio-friendly alt rock album. Even the second track “Once in a While” might start off as a quiet ballad, but soon changes tack and turns up the volume. And third track “Bottom of the Floor” slides further into that harsher realm of discomfort and displacement, which seems to be the theme of this record. (This track is also where the album title comes from.)
We’re given a reprieve on the fifth track, the absolutely gorgeous “Until I Wake Up.” Originally released in demo form as a b-side to the “Counting Blue Cars” single, this is singer JR Richards revealing his deepest fears and weaknesses: the inability to control your life to the point where the dream world seems to be the only escape. It’s one of his most famous songs as a songwriter and he’s performed it and rerecorded it several times over the years in his solo career. I remember hearing this one and thinking this would be an absolutely perfect fit for the Mendaihu Universe, and so it sits nicely on the Songs from the Eden Cycle Vol 4 mixtape.
“5 Star Day” brings us back into the fold like a wake-up call, maybe one that’s needed but unwanted, reaching out in hope that the new day will be much better than the previous one. Maybe not, as it’s soon followed by the sinister “Truth Serum” bringing you back to the harsh reality that you were hoping to escape.
“So Blind” takes us off on a trip we might not want to go on, but we’re already strapped in and off on yet another adventure…very much like the never-ending exhaustion of touring as a band. You’re hoping for some kind of stability and tranquility, but you’re probably not going to find it here. And it takes you through to the brittle mind of “Gone Upside Down” and the psychedelic otherworld of “So Much Time.” It’s a trip that you don’t so much go on as you’re taken on whether you want it or not. And eventually you resurface drained yet somehow invigorated again with “The Bridge Song.”
And to end the album, you’re reminded: you’re the pop-star here, you’re performing for us, so make it happen! Ending the record with the hard-edged and snarky “Pop Guru” is an interesting choice, considering it not only riffs on the Beatles’ 1967 interest in the Maharishi, but uses it as a metaphor for reminding you of your place as a touring musician.
For an album that got little promotion yet had a few tracks used on the hit TV show Charmed, it’s a surprisingly strong and consistent record from start to finish. [They would have other songs featured on TV shows and movies, and singer JR Richards would perform a version of ‘Counting Blue Cars’ himself on an episode of How I Met Your Mother.] “Once in a While” and “Stay Awake” might have gotten some minor play on radio, but there were no music videos, official singles or any other promotion given.
And yet somehow it remains a major favorite of the band’s fans because of that. It’s an underdog record that’s harder than Pet Your Friends and less commercial than 2002’s comeback Opaline (which did in fact get sizeable promotional help). It’s a quirky record that’s more like a deep cut than a hit single, and that’s partly why I love it so much.
Some years back ordered another copy of it from JR Richards himself (signed, of course) and let him know how much the album meant to me, especially during my years writing The Phoenix Effect and its eventual remake as the Bridgetown Trilogy. He was touched by that and appreciated that he’d helped inspire someone in that way. And indeed, it got a ton of play during those basement writing sessions in the late 90s and early 00s (and yes, also during the mid-10s revisions and self-release of the books). It’s the one of theirs I return to the most as well.
I’d been a passing fan of this Belgian trio because of their excellent 1996 trip-hoppy single “2Wicky” (which would show up on multiple soundtracks like Stealing Beauty and I Know What You Did Last Summer), and their debut A New Stereophonic Sound Spectacular had done relatively well with the clubs and critics. I even listened to it once or twice while working in the back rooms of the record store.
But it was their 1998 sophomore release, Blue Wonder Power Milk, that really caught my attention. It was their first with singer Geike Arnaert, who would stay with them for the next several albums, and it also signaled a change in musical style. The melodies were more complex, the sounds more experimental and adventurous.
The opener “Battersea” is upbeat and bouncy, surging with tension yet purposely never quite peaking or releasing. It breaks down slightly several times, and yet it fits perfectly with lyrics about the need to escape your surroundings. It slides next to “One Way Ride”, a horn-laden mood piece continuing that theme.
It trips suddenly to “Dictionary”, the first track featuring guitarist Alex Callier on vocals. It’s a bit of an odd song lyrically but it’s all about the mood here: darker, grittier, sexier. This was the song that initially caught my attention when I heard the album for the first time, since it sticks out so much yet still fits in perfectly. We’ve escaped our surroundings but now we’re in the big city at night where secrets lie.
The first single, “Club Montepulciano” did really well for them in their native country, and it did get some play here in the States here and there. It’s a side quest into the clubbing world, wining and dining and allowing yourself to have fun. But then…
“Eden”, the third single from the album, is a masterpiece in evoking trip-hop yet still exuding warmth and emotion. A classic “if only…” song of heartbreak, it was later covered by none other than Sarah Brightman later that year. This song completely sold me on the album.
The album then slides into a few mood pieces like the grooving “Lung” and the quiet lullaby “Electro Shock Faders” until we hit what would be one of the best songs Ray Davies ever wrote that The Kinks never released: “This Strange Effect”. It’s the opposite of “Eden”: flirty and fun yet still mysterious.
That’s immediately followed by the track “Renaissance Affair” which was never released as a single but was used for a car commercial in the States sometime later, leading the song to show up again as an extra track on their next album, 2000’s The Magnificent Tree. It’s one of their most popular tracks that gets used in various places. It’s a lovely circular melody that matches its theme of constant movement.
The album winds down with a few deep cuts: the staccato strings of “Tuna” and the sunrise quiet of “Magenta”, and finally capped by the oddball hidden track “Blue Wonder Power Milk”.
This album came out in early May 1998 when I was about halfway through writing the longhand version of The Phoenix Effect, so as you can well imagine, it soon received heavy rotation status down in the basement of my parents’ house when I was transcribing and revising it on my computer at night. It was a perfect soundtrack for me to listen to during my writing sessions: it set the moods I was aiming for, but wasn’t intrusive or distracting to make me lose my place. I would come back to it several times over the years, both when I worked on the trilogy in the early 00s and again in the mid 10s when I prepped them for self-publishing.
It also got a lot of play at work as well, especially on those days when I had a lot to do back there. My work station was pretty much my own personal corner then, well established and surrounded by everything I needed to get those products out onto the floor quickly and easily. And right next to the desk on top of a few big plastic crates was my cassette/cd player that I’d set up almost from Day One. After a while, I’d spend my lunch time back there, sneaking in a little more writing while listening to a new release or a current favorite. Blue Wonder Power Milk got so much play back there that summer and into autumn that I’m pretty sure it ended up in the top five of my favorite albums of the year.
And yes, they are on the “I will buy anything from this band without even hearing it first” list of favorite bands! They’re still around coming out with great albums and wonderful live shows. I highly recommend them.
Walk In Silence 