As you may have heard, Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, comes out next week. (A couple of months ago, I interviewed Beck and wrote a short preview of the album. Beck’s changed some of the song titles since then; after some back and forth, “Beggar’s Shoes” became “Gamma Ray.”) I thought this would be a fine time to add another Beck article to the archives: at the beginning of this year, he and I sat down for over an hour to discuss Odelay, the details of how he made it with the Dust Brothers, and many of the bonus tracks included on the recent deluxe edition. Which, as I told friends at the time, was really the ideal topic for a long conversation with Beck.

“I had all these Moog synthesizers,” Beck told me. “The only people using them were Stereolab and a couple of indie bands, so you could go to pawn shops and get them for sixty bucks. I had a pile of them and I’d bring one in and use it until it broke, and then go get another one.”

The version printed in Rolling Stone some months ago was truncated for space reasons, but there’s no reason not to enjoy the whole magillah. (Obviously, the unnamed producer in the article is Danger Mouse.)

posted 2 July 2008 in Archives, Articles and tagged Beck, Odelay. no comments yet