On a Denver night in 2002, Beck arranged an ambush for himself.
The singer-songwriter came to play a set at the Temple Events Center, a century-old synagogue inset with massive stained-glass windows around a circular hall. A far cry from Beck’s previous show in the city — a funk bacchanal at the 8,000-person Magness Arena in 2000 that climaxed with his band cozying up on a red velvet bed lowered from the rafters — the hallowed hall was meant to signal a change in tone from the sexual absurdity of “Midnite Vultures,” his previous album. The night would preview a mysterious new direction for Beck that would manifest itself as his next record, fittingly called “Sea Change.”
Acoustic guitars in hand, Beck and longtime collaborator Smokey Hormel met the crowd with a set of shivering folk and blues songs, a mixture of old standards like Hank Williams’ “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” and unreleased original compositions in the same vein. Some in the crowd yelled out for Beck’s breakthrough hit “Loser” at points — a harsh word, especially when you’re baring your soul.
” ‘Sea Change’ hadn’t come out, so people were wondering what the hell we were doing, playing all these downcast acoustic songs,” Beck said in a phone interview from his hometown of Los Angeles, calling it “the antidote” to the psychedelic free-for-all of his previous tour.
Beck will play two shows in Colorado in the coming days, July 9 as the headliner of Telluride’s The Ride Festival and July 11 at a sold-out Red Rocks show with the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Once again, it’s difficult to say which version of Beck — who turns 47 on Saturday — we’ll get. Similar to his “Sea Change” gig, the shows will kick off a stint of dates ahead of murmurs of a new album, the follow-up to 2014’s “Morning Phase.”
Lushly musical, that effort won him three Grammys, including Album of the Year, beating out Beyoncé, prompting her rabid fan base to take to tweet #WhoIsBeck en masse.
There’s probably a timeline where Beck rides this strain of smoldering folk rock off into his sunset years — he turns 47 on Saturday — to polite acclaim. This isn’t it. By all appearances, his latest album is as grand of a departure as “Sea Change,” albeit embracing dumb fun instead of avoiding it.
The release has been kept hush, but it’s telling that he’s chosen to kick off his latest tour at The Ride Festival, the sort of breezy gig Beck has credited as influencing his latest album. Here, another shift: Once pointedly confrontational — he all but ripped an armpit fart solo at his first show in Colorado in 1994, despite attracting enough fans to sell out the defunct Boulder venue Ground Zero three times over, according to Doug Kauffman, who promoted the show — Beck doesn’t merely embrace his live shows, but considers them “the only argument for selling records.”
“These shows from the last five years have been very memorable and celebratory,” Beck said. “It’s what I’d envisioned when I started out.”
The album’s two pre-release singles hint at what he’s talking about. Released last year, both “Dreams” and “Wow” are erratic pop Frankensteins, leashing dozens of opposing ideas to a common directive: Shred the rug, soul-excavating metaphors be damned. He still sees holes in what he could consider an airtight festival set, Beck said, but these tracks already sound like spackle.
Writing the new album has been a celebration trial and error — each project “requires a sort of humility to realize that you really don’t know anything,” he said — as is often the case when he steps in the studio. Some ideas pan out fairly quickly; others are scattered seed. “Sea Change” gestated for a decade before it saw release, Beck said in the way of an example. Other, older ideas are still on the shelf.
“There are records I’ve made that I haven’t put out,” Beck said. “I did a record in the ’90s — very electronic, influenced by Aphex Twin and Kraftwerk and other weird kinds of electronic stuff I was finding in Japan at the time. Some version of that, something in that vein, will come out at some point.”
Beck has been cross-pollinating with people more than places lately, though, another consequence of the artist- and idea-rich festival circuit. He’s brought the “Seven Nation Army”-famous Jack White in the studio to lay down bass on a track, tapped hipster priest Father John Misty as a back-up singer, and even put the performance onus on his fans with “Song Reader,” an album originally released only as sheet music. Last year, he invited Sean Foreman, of Boulder party-rap duo 3OH!3, to work a session for his latest album.
For how splashy those crossovers have been, a recent trip to see New Orleans’ Preservation Hall Jazz Band, who he’ll share the stage at Red Rocks with on Tuesday, was a reminder of the fundamentals. He caught the band at Preservation Hall, the storied French Quarter venue from which the band takes its name, a pegboard-walled space the size of a living room.
Here was the root of collaboration laid bare — instruments and people in a room, translating each other’s ideas through their filters. From the goof-rap of “Loser” to the open-heart blues of “Morning Phase,” Beck is really just that: a lens for music’s movements and moods, skewing genres just enough to expose their seams. The genres might change, but there is a singular Beck-ness to it all, a wink or telling lack thereof.
“I always try to have perspective of popular culture. If you were transported to 1954, you’d probably be horrified with popular music,” Beck said, referencing Frank Sinatra’s infamous duet “Mama Will Bark,” a novelty song he recorded with American actress Dagmar that scraped the Billboard Top 20 charts.
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Above all, that perspective has instilled an almost holy reverence for the tradition of the musician, a slipstream of creative energy that connects the next Beck album — or any bedroom composition — back to the furthest reaches of humanity. In his purview, every great song is a crystallization of countless of other pieces of music that came before it; each “Moonlight Sonata” a gem of interpretation that glints with the stray phrases, melodies and rhythms of other inspired minds.
“When you’ve been playing for a certain number of years, you realize we’re all working on a song together,” Beck said. “Maybe one or two things will emerge for the ages. Did you write it? Did I write it? No, but everybody kind of played their part in the end. That’s the beauty of popular music.”
