The more I hear about this new Beck album, the more things confirm this is gonna be a second ‘Sea Change’, and I wonder, was that necessary? As much as I love the 2002 record, a sequel is always just a sequel. After ‘Blue Moon’, Beck has shared a second track off his upcoming ‘Morning Phase’ and the new song ‘Walking Light’ sounds very much in phase with this oldie as much as a twelve-year-old album can be considered as an oldie. Let’s see, this desolated big croon that occupies all the room, these piano notes blending into an orchestral grandiosity, these soaring magnificent goosebumps-inducing strings (done again by Beck’s father David Campbell), this aerial and soothing bombast,… it’s a beautiful song but it tends to recycle a lot of his emotional soundscapes, intimate feelings, and previous sonic discoveries, the crashing ending included… The only difference, I don’t hear much of the excruciating pain bleeding all over the ‘Sea Change’ tracks, this one is serene and almost glorious.
On the making of ‘Morning Phase’, Beck explained to NPR that it was not a easy process: ‘I tried to make this record a few times. I went to Nashville a few years ago and I was gonna make a Nashville record. I did a lot of recording there, and it was one of those things where it didn’t quite come together. That’s really the beginning of the record, is going to Nashville. But there was something about bringing it back here [to Los Angeles]. I got the band that I did most of Sea Change with, I got all of them together, and it just felt right. The songs started to work and it started to feel like a record.’
In the same interview, we also learn that the record is pretty slow, with ‘nothing faster than 60 BPMs’, whereas ‘your average dance song is 120’. ‘Yeah, I think a hit song has to be 120-something’ adds Beck, so it’s obviously not what he wasn’t aiming for it this time.
‘Walking Light’ is rumored to have been produced by Jack White and the album is out on February 25th.