Latest Release
- JUL 21, 2023
- 2 Songs
- Mellow Gold · 1993
- Odelay (Deluxe Edition) · 1996
- Sea Change · 2002
- Morning Phase · 2014
- Sea Change · 2002
- Colors · 2015
- Let's Get Lost - Single · 2010
- Colors · 2017
- Odelay · 1996
- Wow - Single · 2016
Essential Albums
- On Beck Hansen’s fifth album, you can feel the meticulous layers of his unique musical approach—the absurdist lyrics, the hyperactive audio collage, the wry post-modernism—falling away. Made amid the wreckage of his breakup with long-term partner Leigh Limon, Sea Change is just that: a directional shift to emotionally raw balladry. “The Golden Age” evokes dawn-lit desolation, while “Guess I’m Doing Fine” wrings an affecting acoustic miracle from an almost bottomless melancholy.
- 1998
- In the months leading up to Odelay’s release in 1996, Beck remembers a famous record producer inviting him to go for a drive. I’ve heard your album, the producer told him. Don’t release it. Huge mistake. Start over. Make something real—a real album, with real songs. Beck was crestfallen. His first album, 1994’s Mellow Gold, had made him a cult favorite and critical fascination, but he was still a ways off from solid ground. “I was 24,” he tells Apple Music, on the album’s 25th anniversary. “I had virtually no money, and had just spent about $300,000 making this record. I thought I’d be paying it off working in a minimum-wage job for a decade.” By now, we know what happened. But you can imagine what the producer was thinking. As much as Odelay reflects the past—the dusty samples, the kitschy callbacks to ’60s pop (“The New Pollution”), ’70s country (“Sissyneck”), and ’80s hip-hop (“Where It’s At”)—it also presages an attention-deficient future where we cobble stories together from fragments and feel our focus constantly shifting from one shiny object to the next. At the time, people didn’t have cell phones, and the biggest bands on the radio were post-grunge artists like Smashing Pumpkins and Silverchair. Within a couple of years, we’d start hearing the pastiche of artists like Gorillaz and Fatboy Slim. But a couple of years can mark an era—Odelay was where we were going, but we weren’t there quite yet. The execution is experimental, but the source material is folksy and earthbound, the hand-me-downs of distant uncles and yard sales. Beck remembers sifting through samples with the album’s producers, The Dust Brothers, not just as an exercise in finding cool sounds, but in cultural archeology. Or, as he puts it, “let’s take a moment on a forgotten record that nobody has ever heard, that tangentially has nothing to do with the harmonic structure of the song or any of the actual hook or songwriting of the song…and let's make that the centerpiece of a new piece of music.” You might come for the style (“Devils Haircut”) or the smart-ass humor (“Lord Only Knows”), but at the heart of Odelay is a sense of play and fascination, of wandering wonderstruck through a junkyard of things half-remembered and half-experienced and building your world anew. The album’s cover famously featured the image of an absurd, mop-like dog called the Komondor, leaping over a hurdle—a dog whose puppy, in a simple twist of fate, Beck ended up living up the street from. When he first saw the image, he laughed out loud. But he also felt a pang of kinship. “I feel like I’m trying to achieve the impossible of clearing this hurdle that I’m not even remotely qualified to clear,” he remembers thinking. “I don’t even know what I’m doing.” Maybe not. But he did it.
- 2020
- 2017
- 2014
- 2008
- 2005
Artist Playlists
- GRAMMY® winner. Elder statesman of indie rock. Pretty awesome for a "Loser."
- Strap yourself in.
- Lean back and relax with some of their mellowest cuts.
- The eccentric sonic chameleon leaves no genre untouched.
- His quirky brilliance unites alt-rock and hip-hop.
- “There's something of the world that goes into the music of this time.”
Appears On
- The Chemical Brothers
- The Chemical Brothers
- Fabrizio Moretti & Nick Valensi
- Beck and Thomas Mars discuss their collaboration on “Odyssey.”
- Beck talks through the album on its 25th anniversary.
- Strombo reflects back to 1995 when ’90s indie had its peak.
- The artist talks about the 27th anniversary of 'Mellow Gold.'
- Conversation about selected music from his personal playlist.
- The artist talks about his 14th studio album ‘Hyperspace.'
- The legendary musician picks the 5 Best Songs on Apple Music.
More To See
About Beck
Since the early ’90s, Beck has traveled a decidedly idiosyncratic path—and it has taken him from slacker-pop iconoclast to genre-melding elder statesman. Born in 1970, Beck Hansen got his musical start in New York’s anti-folk scene; his relocation to Los Angeles led to him incorporating hip-hop-inspired sounds, a combo that helped “Loser,” his chugging yet surrealistic breakthrough, go from college-radio oddity to one of 1994’s defining singles. Over the ensuing years, Beck became known for defying any expectations “Loser” had placed on him; he went back to his indie roots on 1994’s One Foot in the Grave before getting maximalist on 1996’s ambitious Odelay, exploring bossa nova and blues on Mutations two years later, and reveling in grooves on the following year’s Midnite Vultures. All the while, his high-energy live sets became the stuff of Lollapalooza legend, and his eye-catching videos were staples of MTV. In 2002 he released the stripped-down Sea Change, an introspective album that, to great acclaim, showed off the sensitive side of someone previously pegged as an ironist. Beck settled into being a pop explorer after that, releasing sterling singles—the sun-dappled “Girl,” the breezy “Gamma Ray,” the stadium-ready “E-Pro”—that anchored hook-filled albums. He put his songwriting prowess forward on Song Reader, which was released as a book of sheet music in 2012, and on Morning Phase, which called back to the Sea Change era with its subdued vibes. As the decade progressed, Beck incorporated ideas borrowed from big-ticket pop, working with producers such as Pharrell Williams and Greg Kurstin on his albums Colors and Hyperspace—but he retained the wide-ranging approach that’s made him one of the alt-rock boom’s most enduring stars.
- HOMETOWN
- Los Angeles, CA, United States
- BORN
- July 8, 1970
- GENRE
- Alternative