How does beck wrote lyrics

Not that I have anything against the way that a lot of modern music is made — with plugins and programmed beats — I just wanted to hear something that had human toil in it. Although the writing itself was a struggle, in terms of the craft and fine-tuning that went into it, the feeling, emotion and the buoyancy you hear is real.

You get to paint pictures of environments or feelings or moods that hopefully evoke a recognisable mindstate. There are a million examples of that, which as I kid I was always drawn to, and I guess that fascination has just continued. He grew up poor in a creative household, where thinking for yourself was highly encouraged.

Al was an integral part of the Fluxus movement, which seeks to subvert the traditional notions of how art was defined. Beck penned his first song at age There was something un-precious about it. It was pretty romantic, but it had this rough-hewn, down-in-the-grave kind of feeling.

Born out of experience. At 14, Beck dropped out of high school. He worked odd jobs and taught himself to play blues guitar. Just make it you. Beck moved back to L. He started playing on any stage that would have him, donning a Storm Trooper mask and setting his guitar on fire. Stereopathic Soul Manure compiles some of that early material, from to I mostly just wrote things that we all thought were funny. He tells the story of a rooming house he lived in, where his neighbor, a curmudgeonly old loner, once burst into his room threatening him with a Taser gun.

Some of those songs were kind of half-baked, but that was the intention at the time. The idea was to just spew out things, and see what happens. And I still try to hold to that, to some degree. But Mellow Gold reversed that notion, and by the time he dropped Odelay two years later, doubts about his staying power had vanished.

Along the way, Beck has had the chance to meet many of his musical heroes, including Joni Mitchell and Thurston Moore. Have there been any writing secrets gleaned from these meetings? But I wish it was like that. I wish you could be the apprentice. They were more interested in what you were doing, what was going on with you.

At the time of this interview, Guero has yet to hit stores, but Beck already has his eye on his next album. You take some old ideas and make some new ones. Different things were expected from music than in the 20s, when music was a thing to take your mind off other things. That changed after the folk era, and after the singer-songwriter era. Then music became more personal, more profound, it had more relevance. In his own career he has seen a something of a similar evolution in his own songwriting.

I found people tuned out. So in the early 90s I wrote humorous songs, and the absurdity of them or something trenchant about them would go over. Writing the songs for the Song Reader was a new challenge again. But if the song was too clever or self-conscious it wouldn't have that universality.

He has not written much recently, but he is certain that the project will have exerted a lasting influence on his work. So I'll be more exacting. Though, I've done this before, with Sea Change. I put those songs under the microscope, took out lines that were too easy. The artists were all chosen by McSweeney's — "Though I've worked with some of them before," Beck adds.

It looks like one of the illustrations from the 20s, when they had this crude colour process," and for America Here's My Boy, which initially showed a modern soldier, "but I thought it worked better with a first-world-war soldier. He wants to hear what can be done with these songs, "I want to hear how far away they are from the original way they were written," he says.