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CATCHING UP WITH BECK (pitchfork.com)

Between his Record Club covers project and his increasingly impressive production work for famous friends, Beck has recently put in studio time with what seems like everybody recently: Charlotte Gainsbourg, Wilco, Feist, Jamie Lidell, Thurston Moore, Tortoise, Bat for Lashes, St. Vincent, Liars, Devendra Banhart, MGMT, Tobacco, and Stephen Malkmus. These creative partnerships have helped to revitalize the alt-rock originator, who just turned 40 earlier this month.

He’s also contributed songs to several recent soundtracks, including Twilight: Eclipse, “True Blood”, and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, which found him writing garage rock songs for the lead character’s fictional band, Sex Bob-Omb. He’s a busy guy. And, during a recent phone interview, he jumped from project to project and thought to thought in a casually random way that shouldn’t be surprising considering his penchant for genre-hopping.

Beck talks in a spacey California drawl. He takes long pauses in between sentences; over a windy phone line, it was tough to tell whether he had completed a thought or was taking a break only to get deeper into it. In the following interview, he touched on all the topics above and hinted at new Beck material that may come out sooner than you’d expect:

Pitchfork: Considering the Scott Pilgrim soundtrack– where you’re writing songs for a made-up band– and your recent work with Charlotte Gainsbourg, and all the Record Club collaborations, it seems like you’re really enjoying writing and playing with other people right now as opposed to working on your own stuff.

Beck Hansen: Maybe it’s more interesting for me to work with other people right now, just to change things up a little bit. Since Charlotte called me a few years ago I’ve been calling other people and asking if they needed help with their records. I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I’ve done so many albums where I’ve been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It’s a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I’m trying to do myself. Also, I haven’t had a record deal in over two years, so maybe that’s why you’re seeing more of these collaborations.

Working with Charlotte, there are things I can write for her that wouldn’t work if I sang them. So it opens up other ways of making music. At this point, I know what works and what doesn’t for me; I know my own limitations. And if somebody says, “I need songs for a cartoon garage band– they look like this and they should sound like this,” it gives you a direction. I like having that kind of assignment.

But I’m always working on my own music, too. I’ve been working on a record for a few years; I recorded it in the fall of 2008.

Pitchfork: How far along are you on that album?

BH: I’ve worked on it a little bit here or there but it’s the kind of thing where I turn around and two years have gone by and it starts to get less relevant to what’s happening at large. At this point, five other bands may have done something that felt really exciting and new two years ago. Like, the title of the record was going to be Rococo and now Arcade Fire have a song called “Rococo”. But I’m sure the music is going to come out. I’m not sure if I’m going to put out 12″s or put the songs on my website. I just have to get them done. I’m going to try and finish them this summer. It’s just a matter of the songs being good enough and not embarrassing. [laughs]

Pitchfork: It’s exciting to think that we could stop by your website one day an there’ll be a new Beck album there.

BH: Yeah, it’s possible. I mean, there’s not anything stopping it. It’s just getting the right group of songs. I think there’ll be something coming out by the end of summer, even if it’s just a song or two. Maybe it’s a good idea to just get it out there.

Pitchfork: Does the new stuff have the same garage-rock sound as your last album, Modern Guilt?

BH: Most of it doesn’t sound anything like that. There was a whole group of songs that I was working on before Modern Guilt that I never got around to releasing, so it’s more in that vein. It’s much more… it doesn’t really… I’m not very good at describing it.

Pitchfork: I was wondering if the schizophrenic, 10-minute “Harry Partch” tribute song you put up on your website earlier this year contained bits of new material.

BH: I don’t know– I’d actually have to ask somebody. That song was maybe a bit more hyper. But it’s similar to this other project that I’ve been working on for years, which started with a song I did in ’95 called “Inferno”. We left it off of Odelay because it ended up feeling like this weird rap-rock thing. A lot of the tracks we turned in for that album were pretty confusing for people at the record company, so we thought “Inferno” would just alienate them completely [laughs]. We ended up putting it on the Odelay deluxe reissue. But I’d always wanted to do a longer piece of music like that with all these different sections.

Pitchfork: It doesn’t sound like you’re in a rush to put any of your new songs out.

BH: I actually wanted to have something out last summer [laughs], that was my original plan. And then this summer. But I keep having other things come up. I spent a lot of time on that Charlotte record– I spent much more time on that record than I did on my last record.

Pitchfork: When you get people to contribute to Record Club, do you try to get them to play or sing on songs you’re working on too?

BH: I haven’t done that. Usually there’s barely enough time to do the Record Club. I sometimes want to ask, but I don’t want to be presumptuous. When Thurston [Moore] was around for the Yanni record, I wanted him to play some guitar, but he just had that one day. Next time.

Pitchfork: That current set of Yanni covers is ridiculous.

BH: Yeah. [laughs] We definitely had a lot of fun doing that. My favorite thing is Thurston’s improvised vocals, which are all one-take vocals. He didn’t write anything down. That’s just straight out of the mind of Thurston. I’ve done a lot of that when I’m frustrated, but it probably doesn’t come out line-for-line like his does. Malkmus does that, too.

Pitchfork: You recently did some work with Stephen Malkmus for his new album, too. What was that like?

BH: Great. Within the first two days we had 90 percent of the album recorded. We just put it down live. I just talked to Steve, actually. We’re going to finish it up when he’s done touring.

Pitchfork: With Record Club, it’s just great fun to see these people like Wilco and Feist in the studio together. Not many people would be able to get these artists together like that.

BH: I’ve known and toured with a lot of these bands for years, but there’s this almost unspoken law that you’re not supposed to interact musically. It’s funny. I’ve even ridden on tour buses with bands and there’s no musical interaction. There was a point about eight years ago where I realized, “Why don’t we take advantage of this?” Seeing something like Rock and Roll Circus or The Last Waltz or scenes from Motown culture or different golden periods of music, there was always an interaction happening with bands playing together or writing songs for each other. I may be wrong, but I feel like that might have something to do with why music was so good in those periods– because there was such an intimate interaction.

Pitchfork: How did you get involved with the Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World soundtrack?

BH: I met [director] Edgar [White] through Nigel [Godrich] years ago, and I read the comic books several times. The funny thing is I did the soundtrack songs two years ago, before the film had even been made. Edgar brought in these giant enlargements of frames from the comic book. He put them around the studio and we just looked at those pictures and tried to get some feeling of what the music would sound like. We threw together a couple songs in two days and then they went off and made the film. I got to see it about five months ago; it’s like a sensory overload. I couldn’t imagine what it took to put all that together.

Pitchfork: Was it weird for you working under someone else’s creative vision with this movie?

BH: It’s hard. I’ve done things for movies and more often than not it gets rejected. Like, with the Eclipse soundtrack, I sent them two or three songs and they just used the one that I did with Natasha [Khan of Bat for Lashes]. I sent them something for the last [Twilight] movie that they didn’t use. I heard like 400 bands submitted songs. Whatever you do has to be commercial and it can’t be too distracting– it has to be background music, basically. But I never expect any of these [film songs] to actually get used.

Pitchfork: Based on how the Scott Pilgrim trailers combine things like comic book effects and video game sounds, it does seem like an extension of mash-up culture you tapped into early on with something like Odelay.

BH: Whether you’re aware of it or not, any kind of collage idea becomes a part of how you see the world once you incorporate media and internet and video games and all these things. The film expresses that for sure, and it made me wonder if it’s the beginning of a wave of films that start to incorporate different genres. Growing up, a film was an action film or it was a comedy or it was romantic, but you don’t really see such stark lines between genres nowadays.

It reminded me of these strange Hong Kong films I’d go see in the early 90s out in Monterey Park, which had this massive influx of Chinese immigrants at the time. The films would incorporate three or four genres simultaneously without any real master plan. I remember one where a bride was trying to get a dress and then a ghost comes in the middle of the night and it turns into her boyfriend, who is a vampire. Then the movie turned into slapstick comedy and, all of a sudden, the lead of the film is a different actor. You’re like, “Wait, did another movie start?” Then there would be chase scenes and then all these weird ghosts would show up. It was impossible to keep track with but completely entertaining and bizarre. Those movies were probably an influence on me.

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