Beck's 'Song Reader' to become an album by various artists

From Vulture:

Beck's 2012 sheet-music collection Song Reader is finally being made into a studio album — just not by Beck. Each of the 20 tracks will be performed by a different artist, including Jack White, Jack Black, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, fun., Laura Marling, and Norah Jones, with Beck performing only one of the songs, "Heaven's Ladder." "Like a kid getting a special package in the mail and opening it up with anticipation, these interpretations of songs from the Song Reader book have surpassed what I could have imagined when putting the book together," said Beck, who co-produced the compilation alongside Wes Anderson and Martin Scorsese's music supervisor Randall Poster. "The book addressed the idea of a song in its most elemental form, letting others give it a voice. It amazes me to hear how these musicians have made the songs their own and in the process revealed that the interpretation is the living breathing soul of the piece. These interpretations have made the book something new, something better." We guess Anne Hathaway and Jenny Lewis's rendition didn't make the cut?

Beck covers Michael Jackson

Stream Beck's new album 'Morning Phase'

For the next week before it's released. It's a sequel of sorts to Sea Change but is definitely its own album. Take a listen at NPR.

Beck - Blue Moon

You have to sign up for Spotify (it's free) but it's worth it to hear Beck's new single from his upcoming album Morning Phase:

Beck - I Won't Be Long

An article on Beck's "Song Reader"

I'll just link to the article, but Vulture has a great article about Beck which you can read here. It's fairly insightful to some of his earlier works, and contains some interview bits that help us see inside his crazy head a little bit.  It ends up discussing Beck's latest "album" - Beck Hansen's Song Reader. Read more about that here, from a previous post!

Beck's new "album"

It's called Beck Hansen's Song Reader, and is really just an arrangement of sheet music from Beck. It will contain 20 "tracks" of unreleased and unrecorded material, and it will be up to the his fans to perform them. I have a feeling this will turn out to be pretty awesome, as I'm sure we'll hear lots of different versions of the songs performed by a variety of instruments. I can't play anything other than drums myself (and can't read sheet music) so I'll have to rely on everyone else.  I'll be looking forward to it!

6 Classic Songs That Were Supposed to Be Jokes

#6. "Loser" -- Beck

The first and biggest hit of Beck's life would be the result of a bored Beck and his ability to make up random bullshit on the fly.

He had a lot of practice. Before he got famous, Beck played his music anywhere he could -- in clubs, in coffee houses and on the streets of L.A., usually to crowds who couldn't give less of a shit about him. Being the type of guy he is, he'd eventually break out of whatever song he was playing and start making up random lyrics instead, just to see who was paying attention.

Wikipedia
"Heathcliff the cat, fucking a midget, with a pigeon's foot in the skyyyyy!"

This particular skill came into play later when Beck and Carl Stephenson, a producer for Rap-A-Lot Records, spontaneously decided to record a song in Stephenson's kitchen. Beck started rapping, and they both got a laugh out of how terrible he sounded. As they were playing it back, Beck just started sarcastically singing, "I'm a loser, baby, so why don't you kill me." Everything else is just random nonsense Beck made up while staring at things in Stephenson's kitchen.

Suddenly the lines about dog food, beef and Cheez Whiz make sense. Well, more sense, anyway.

The track took six and a half hours to record and produce from start to finish. Beck wasn't happy with the song, it being something he slapped together as a demonstration of how bad he was at rapping, and only agreed to release it under pressure from his label at the time, Bong Load. Because who wouldn't recognize the wisdom of every business decision made by an organization with such a name?

rockandroll
U2, for example, got their first big break while signed to Boner Fart Records.

"Loser" got Beck the attention he needed, and he soon got picked up by a real label, Geffen Records, which reissued the song in 1994. It peaked at 10 on the Billboard Hot 100, made Beck a star and was ultimately ranked #203 in Rolling Stone's "The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time." Not bad for a bunch of gibberish made up in a kitchen.

Continue the list at Cracked.com!

Beck and Demetri Martin Conversation Part 1

Part 1 of a conversation between Beck Hansen and Demetri Martin, from Beck's "Irrelevant Topics" site.  They talk about some pretty crazy stuff, very interesting read.  Also irrelevant.

Check it out.

Shout out to my bro for finding it!