‘We Live Again’: the most overlooked Beck song
Among folks who consider themselves Beck fans, which would be a fairly large group of people, there is a very small subset that enjoys all of his various musical incarnations with equal fervour. For most of us, there will always be clear preferences—some favour the rapping rapscallion Beck; some the folksy troubadour. Others demand a Beck who is very sad and drifting alone in outer space. Quite a few people wanna get down with party Beck in his little white suit.
Perhaps, to be more accurate, all of these descriptions should be adjusted into the past tense, considering our baby-faced hero is now a shocking 54 years old and not as likely to breakdance or spacewalk at our command. But, since we’re talking about choosing an “overlooked” Beck song from the past, we might as well start by acknowledging that no two people’s ideal Becks are going to be exactly the same, and that most of us would eliminate half of the man’s finest compositions without the slightest consideration.
Fortunately, in my case, this whole process is made slightly easier by the existence of one specific album that conveniently manifests my own best-case-scenario Beck. It’s 1998’s Mutations! Rarely has an album’s title better served to define its place in the context of an artist’s career. Released as the follow-up to the best-selling and arguably best-reviewed album in the Beck catalogue (1996’s Odelay), Mutations wound up feeling like an unexpectedly self-indulgent, folky digression, welcomed by the old fans of acoustic guitar Beck, but bemoaned by the Odelay bandwagoners seeking a new batch of bumshaking, sample-heavy radio bangers. Midnite Vultures would placate those people just a year later, but while Mutations came and went without anything approaching a ‘Devil’s Haircut’ or ‘Where It’s At’ type of MTV hit, it did slowly burrow into its listeners’ “cold brains,” greatly aided by the fact that we were still a few years shy of file sharing, and buying a CD meant giving it a damn good chance to “stick”.
Mutations effectively and permanently split the rail upon which the Hansen train was travelling during the height of his fame, making it quite clear that, despite the major label backing and VMA victories, Beck would still be following his creative whims like a proper ‘90s indie hero. That aforementioned major record label, DGC, probably wasn’t thrilled about it—Mutations sold about one-fourth as many units as Odelay in the US. But critics were, for the most part, quite impressed, and over time, the record gained a growing appreciation among fans from both the Midnite Vultures camp and the more obvious tribe of Sea Change—the beautiful 2002 record that ranks among the all-time celebrations of sad bastardry.
On Mutations, Beck splits the difference between his various personas and manages to be less obnoxious and more endearing, on a human level, than on just about any other project across his now 30+ year career. ‘Nobody’s Fault But My Own’ is a warm-up for Sea Change, for sure, and quite lovely, but the mood changes greatly and often. ‘Tropicalia’ goes in a fun Brazilian direction; ‘Bottle of Blues’ taps back into a One Foot in the Grave vibe; and ‘Canceled Check’ is a sort of cosmic cowboy song that would pair well with another Nigel Godrich-produced record of the same era: Pavement’s Terror Twilight.
The winner of the overlooked song trophy, though, is the harpsichord-driven mid-album ballad ‘We Live Again’, one of the most beautiful three minutes not just in Beck’s canon, but from the entirety of the ‘90s “alternative” era. Lyrically inspired by Beck’s uncle Al Hansen—an avante-garde artist who ran with the likes of Andy Warhol, John Cage, and Yoko Ono—’We Live Again’ weaves some incredibly evocative imagery under its achingly lovely melody: “These withered hands have dug for a dream / Sifted through sand and leftover nightmares.”
Al Hansen died in 1995, just as his nephew’s own star was on the rise, and the loss hit Beck quite hard. As a listener in 1998, of course, this subtext was entirely lost, but knowing the background of ‘We Live Again’ only gives it an added weight nearly 30 years later. It’s a moment of tranquillity in an otherwise noisy and ever-unpredictable period in the life of young Beck Hansen and all the people that live within him.
