Beck Hansen might be the only guy who can name an album Hyperspace in the middle of an information meltdown and still sound like he’s lounging on a satin couch in some 3AM dreamscape. “No way!” he says when I tell him it’s in my top three. He’s not exactly a man of hyperbole — more a man of contradictions.
One minute he’s praising Pharrell Williams as a “master minimalist” — “It’s really a magic trick. He does so much with so little,” Beck marvels, still baffled even after spending years in the studio with him. The next, he’s talking about how he’s throwing everything at the wall. “I sort of obviously go between genres and I don’t really adhere to a specific sound,” he says, like we needed the reminder.
If you were hoping Hyperspace might be the fun party record to follow the kaleidoscopic pop of Colors, Beck would like you to sit down and read the tracklist. “Dark Places.” “Everlasting Nothing.” “Saw Lightning.” “It’s not what I’d call party atmosphere for the nighttime,” he deadpans, in that sleepy Zen voice of his.
So what is it? Well, even Beck doesn’t exactly know. “It’s weird — this record kind of made itself,” he shrugs. He describes it as “something in this gray area where I don’t really know what it is,” which is basically the Beck mission statement since he was making videos on VHS tape in a freezer. Pharrell’s role was to take Beck the Musical Hoarder and force him to choose one or two perfect colors to paint with. “He has such a deep instinct on what’s essential in a song,” Beck says. “Whereas I throw a bunch of ideas, and there’s something special in there — but I wouldn’t necessarily be able to define what it is.”
That’s Beck’s sweet spot — the half-dreamt. Hyperspace came together over years. Tracks like “Saw Lightning” emerged from “a big mess” in the studio. “I was just playing the slide, then he put a beat, I played piano. We made this big mess and it was completely spontaneous.” If you’re picking up cataclysm vibes, that’s intentional. “It has to do with sort of cataclysmic events… those things that wake you up. Full of anxiety and dread, but maybe they make you appreciate what you have,” Beck says.
And speaking of nostalgia: the Uneventful Days video — with its nods to his own past — shows Beck is both allergic to and addicted to his own legacy. MTV-era Beck was all “Hey, I got a camera, stand in front of this wall, let’s shoot.” Björk was “doing it right,” he insists — “iconic and realized.” His? “Much more like… spontaneous. No calculation.”
Is there a Beck movie coming? He shrugs. “Maybe I even regret not doing a film or something, like Prince doing Purple Rain or the Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night. They amplify the music.” There’s a pile of footage from a New Orleans trip. He’s threatening to do something with it.
Oh, and yes, the clothes. Beck still shows up at runways like the ghost of garage sales past. “I didn’t grow up with money,” he says. “I’d go to Salvation Army, find these treasures — suits from the ’50s — that’s a lot of what I wore as a teenager.” He’s still a kid playing dress-up in old boots. “Fashion is linked to music and an idea we project. Performing music is ritual, and costumes go back to the earliest times of being human.”
Beck: forever the magician, the thrift store mystic, the pop shaman digging for the everlasting nothing — and finding it sounds pretty damn good in your headphones.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the video below.
