Understanding Beck’s unique approach to creating his 1996 album ‘Odelay’: “Mistakes stay in”
Even in the alt-rock glory days of the early 1990s, when hundreds of bands were getting record deals in the wake of Nirvana’s supernova-style resetting of the pop landscape, the betting odds on Beck Hansen sticking around weren’t good.
Beck’s breakout 1993 hit ‘Loser’ was widely regarded as the new, official anthem of the so-called Generation X “slacker” culture, and the strange fellow singing it was certainly interesting. But the song had come from the deepest reaches of left field, initially released in a total count of 500 copies by the microscopic indie label Bong Load.
Beck had recorded it on an eight-track machine with producer Karl Stephenson, basically on a whim. It was charming, it was lo-fi, it was a novelty smash for the ‘90s—but it wasn’t going to launch a long and illustrious career.
From the major labels’ perspective, though, the marching orders at this point in history were to sign anyone and everyone who might be the next Kurt Cobain, and so Beck, who had been living in squalor in LA at the age of 23, was now a hot commodity.
“I didn’t want to get involved with a bunch of business people who might want to package me,” Beck told Gannett News in 1997, “But ‘Loser’ became a hit on its own terms, so I just sort of skipped over that hump of having to prove myself”.
Better still, when he did finally decide to sign with Nirvana’s label, Geffen, the execs there appreciated the off-the-cuff nature of ‘Loser’ as a viable blueprint, and gave Beck a unique level of creative freedom right out of the gate. Within a year, the album Mellow Gold had legitimised him as far more than a one-trick pony, and by the time his follow-up album Odelay arrived in 1996, any concepts of Beck as some sort of novelty figure were thoroughly demolished.
Still regarded as one of the most sonically adventurous and genre-splicing albums of the 1990s, Odelay was beat-heavy, funny, and masterfully layered like a Beastie Boys album, but with the looseness, melodicism, and appealing imperfections of a Pavement record.
“It’s not a desire to be zany or flippant,” Beck said while touring Odelay, “That’s vulgar and cheapens the music. There’s also a danger of making songs too retro or nostalgic. I’m trying to get to a place where this merging of styles is so fluent and natural that you don’t notice the different snippets.”
He felt that the best way to smooth over those creases was to avoid plotting them out in the first place, saying, “I start with no plan. I improvise and try to capture something on tape as it’s born. Writing songs before going into the studio is uninspiring, because it’s not fresh anymore”.
With the help of the production team, the Dust Brothers, Beck almost intentionally undercut his better instincts in the studio, and as future records would prove, he was fully capable of writing pristine, traditional, well-orchestrated pop songs, but Odelay wasn’t meant to grow that way: the beauty was in the mess.
“I keep recording until there are enough imperfections,” the musician explained, “All the mistakes stay in, like someone talking in the background or a messed-up bass line. I go, ‘OK, that bass line is more natural’, and I re-record the whole song around it. I work until I’ve let down my guard.”
Actually, if you really think about it, meticulously harvesting errors and crafting new ideas around them is just a different version of obsessive perfectionism; not a slacker version, to be sure, but maybe a distinctly 1990s version.
