Beck and the heartbreaking finality of ‘Sea Change’ at 20
People know to give you your space when listening to Sea Change. It’s one of those unwritten, non-verbalized realities that we’ve all just come to accept in our listening habits. Certain records mean that you’re going through certain specific feelings. The volcanic outpouring of heartache and confusion dropped onto the world by Beck was incredibly surprising at the time, if for no other reason because of the Beck that we had gotten to know a decade prior.
Starting off as the stoned-out slacker icon who helped designate Generation X as the ‘Loser’ age, Beck holed himself away for nearly two years, leading to calls of one-hit wonderdom. People didn’t know that Beck was in the laboratory, cooking up some of the most eclectic sample-heavy alternative rock that had ever been put to tape. With major assistance from The Dust Brothers, Beck surprised just about everyone when he returned with one of the best albums of the 1990s, Odelay.
This was how it stayed throughout the rest of the decade. Mutations was a forebearer of what was to come, but that still had plenty of wonky production touches courtesy of Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich. Besides, when he almost immediately changed course and became a funk rock energy animal on Midnite Vultures, it seemed like Beck was more comfortable being the life of the party than he was being the sadsack with an acoustic guitar spilling his guts on the couch.
But what a magnificent sadsack he turned out to be. Sea Change is a twelve-song journey into that part of your brain that dies the second the person you love tells you that they don’t love you. If that sounds heavy, that’s because it is. But if that sounds like a slog, then fear not: Sea Change is also remarkably beautiful, lush, and strangely life-affirming in its analysis of heartbreak. With just an acoustic guitar in hand, Beck managed to be intimately personal and completely universal at the same time.
Even better, he actually made it fun to listen to. Maybe not “fun” in the conventional sense, but completely engrossing from the second that ‘The Golden Age’ comes drifting through the speakers. Once again paired with Godrich, the immediate warmth of Sea Change is a red herring for what Beck is about to get into. After the breakup of his decade-long relationship, Beck returned to the folkie that he originally was, only this time equipped with a better understanding of how to make “stripped-down” arrangements sound absolutely enormous.
There’s nothing that’s minimalist in Sea Change. The focus is on Beck and his guitar, but around him are heavenly slide guitar lines straight out of George Harrison albums, eerie strings pulled straight from James Bond films, and languid tempos that almost point directly to country music. Beck might have seemed like he was stepping back from the eclecticism of his past work, but that wasn’t true at all. Sea Change was just as wonky and unexpected as any of his previous albums.
Case in point – the reworked version of ‘It’s All In Your Mind’ that sits at the heart of the album. Originally a non-album single that eventually found its way onto international additions of his 1995 album One Foot in the Grave, Beck returned to the song’s sombre tone during the sessions for Sea Change. Replacing the bleak strums with intricate fingerpicked lines, Beck manages to dust off a past version of himself that continued to resonate in his new material. ‘It’s All In Your Mind’ still fits, but it also represents the inherent contradiction at the heart of Sea Change: this is heartbreaking music but rendered so beautiful in its composition.
That didn’t seem to bother Beck, an artist who proved to be remarkably comfortable with contradictions. He also continued to show his desire to change, transforming back into his Odelay-era white-boy rap-funk side for his follow-up, 2005’s Guero. The gentle folk persona didn’t really make its full return until 2014’s Morning Phase, at which point Beck’s genre-hopping became completely expected. But Sea Change was a complete surprise when it dropped in the fall of 2002, and it continues to surprise thanks to its depth of emotion. It might not be Beck’s biggest album, but it is his most timeless and important because it’s his one album for everyone.
