Beck’s ‘Colors’ finally revealed
Alt-rock veteran’s longawaited 13th album is dance-floor ready
You can’t rush greatness. Just take it from Beck, who surprised fans in June 2015 with amorous new song Dreams, a euphoric blast of skittering drums and disco-funk guitars. Two years, three more singles and countless delays later, the track has finally found a home on the alt-rock veteran’s 13th studio album, Colors (out Friday), his long-gestating, dance floor-ready departure from Grammy-winning album of the year Morning Phase.
So why the hold-up?
It was partly out of “wanting to have extra time to get all the details right: the artwork, the videos,” says Beck Hansen, 47. “Also, I’d been on the road intensely for about five years. We were about to put the record out and (tour) for another year, and I just felt I needed to be home for a little bit.”
Beck started writing Colors in 2013, the year before he released his ruminative folk-rock masterstroke Morning Phase. The sparkling 10-song effort is a collaboration between him and pop songwriter/producer Greg Kurstin (Kelly Clarkson, Pink), who mined inspiration from the feel-good catalogs of ’70s icons including David Bowie and Talking Heads: “bands that embraced rhythm in dance music and did something artistic with it,” Beck says.
The first song they wrote was the piano-driven Dear Life, a jaunty ode to dashed dreams and rolling with life’s punches. While that came together in just two days, others went through multiple iterations as the two experimented with different sounds in the studio: infusing the kaleidoscopic title track with vibrant synths and pitch-altered vocals, and second single Wow with woozy hip-hop beats reminiscent of Beck’s rap playlist go-tos Lil Yachty and Young Thug.
Every Colors song is punctu-
“Music has that power to be a small reminder of the beauty in living. It’s good to be amongst the world, be in the moment.”
ated by Beck’s immense gratitude to still be making music, after suffering a spinal injury on a 2005 music video shoot that resurfaced years later, sidelining him from performing live until late 2011.
“I thought I would be able to play music (again), but not the way I was used to,” Beck says of his three-year hiatus from touring. “When you’ve gone through some periods when you’ve gone adrift, or there’s struggle, or there isn’t a lot of joy in things, and then when you find it again, (you realize) how appreciative you are. I had that feeling, and music has that power to be a small reminder of the beauty in living. It’s good to be amongst the world, be in the moment.” Beck says he already has a lot of new music that’s “almost finished or in progress,” and hopes his Colors follow-up won’t take another four years to be released.
“I do like that the cycle of music is going much quicker these days,” he says. When he broke out with sophomore album Mellow Gold and single Loser in 1994, “people expected a new record every two to three years. Now, I was looking at (rapper) Future, and he put out 10 to 12 albums since my last record came out.”
Early in his career, Beck was dubbed the “King of Slackers,” a label he was put off by and found reductive.
“I was a little bit horrified,” he says. “I was trying to bring together this wide, disparate array of art and ideas, and then somebody says, ‘You’re just a slacker who likes to sit on the couch and play video games.’ I was like, ‘What? Wait!’ ”
But with age and experience, he no longer sweats public opinion.
“It’s something that you can’t control at all,” Beck says. “I gave up on having any expectation of what the perception is going to be. You write a lyric and people project their own things on it and it becomes something else. That’s the beauty of it.”