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.
*
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.
