As he prepares to release Ride Lonesome, his 15th studio album, Beck has been reflecting with The Times on his unlikely early success and the frequent left turns he’s taken throughout his career.
The singer-songwriter’s breakthrough, of course, came with 1994’s Loser, but prior to that, he was struggling to make an impact on both first the New York and then the LA folk scenes.
“I really didn’t have much of a following at all,” he says. “People weren’t ready for deconstructed folk music featuring fingerstyle guitar with surrealist lyrics. In fact they hated it.”
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All that changed, though, when Beck switched things up and Loser became a hit: “I had no idea what I was doing, it was a giant experiment,” he admits. “Previously I’d been writing 30 different versions of Bob Dylan’s Desolation Row for solo acoustic guitar and suddenly I had a hit with Loser, which is a rap song.”
It seemed entirely possible that Loser would be a flash in the pan, but two years later, Beck’s fifth album Odelay would sell more than two million copies. “Everyone was as baffled as I was,” he says. “I remember the president of my record label doing a toast to the success of Odelay, saying that he had no idea why it worked but he was happy it did.”
At this point, it seemed that world domination was on the cards, but Beck says that this was never on his mind, despite encouragement from rock royalty. “I remember Bono sitting me down and saying, ‘What are you doing? We were all waiting for you to take over!’ I didn’t have the stomach for it.’”
And so Beck continued to be Beck, just sort of doing what he fancied. After Odelay, he released the decidedly more downtempo Mutations, and then came Midnite Vultures, which saw him move towards funk and R&B.
One of the most memorable songs on the record was album closer Debra, which sounded almost like a pastiche of a classic Prince ballad.
“It was an ode to the R&B songs I was hearing on the radio at the time,” says Beck. “I was fascinated by how sexless alternative rock was while the R&B songs were full of it, so I imagined a working-class guy with a normal job, in his cheap car, trying to embody that spirit of seduction.”
If that was Beck playing a character, it sounds like Ride Lonesome comes from a much more personal place. It was written during the aftermath of his divorce, when he says he was “navigating difficult waters.”
“The album is about those moments when everything is stripped bare and you’re without the things you care about the most,” he explains. “You’re trying to find your faith again.”
Ride Lonesome is released on 18 September.
