Remember about Beck’s last trick, his intention to release his last album as sheet music? A really frustrating thing for fans! Let’s face it, even if you are a musician – and I am not one – it’s not the same thing, how do you interpret a song if you have never heard the composer play? You have to be very good and inventive! Is it total free playground? How do you know you aren’t doing it completely the wrong way? I suppose there is no wrong or right way in this case…
On Tuesday, Beck wrote a long article for the New Yorker, in order to justify himself I suppose. He explained his love for old sheet music, seeing it as ‘a way to represent how people felt about music back then, and to speak to what was left, in our nature, of that instinct to play popular music ourselves’. But for Beck, this isn’t about nostalgia, it's rather a way to recover the cachet and purpose that songs have recently lost:
‘More recently, digital developments have made songs even less substantial-seeming than they were when they came on vinyl or CD. Access to music has changed the perception of it. Songs have lost their cachet; they compete with so much other noise now that they can become more exaggerated in an attempt to capture attention. The question of what a song is supposed to do, and how its purpose has altered, has begun to seem worth asking.’
But of course, this means that some people will make the effort to play them! And this also means that these songs will have a universal appeal, a standard potential, something very difficult to achieve as Beck explained:
‘The songs I would write for one of my own records began to seem less appropriate than songs written in a broader style. At times, I struggled against my own writing instincts—where was the line between the simplistic and the universal, the cliché and the enduring? Classic songs can transcend and transform a cliché, magnifying a well-trodden phrase or sentiment and making it into something elemental. But often that approach descends into banality and platitudes. My appreciation for the ability of songwriters to avoid those pitfalls drove a lot of the writing here; still, I have little idea whether any of these songs managed to find that line. In the right hands, maybe they’ll be able to come a little closer to it.
I thought a lot about the risks of the inherent old-timeyness of a songbook. I know I have friends who will dismiss it as a stylistic indulgence, a gimmick. There’s a way of miniaturizing and neutralizing the past, encasing it in a quaint, retro irrelevancy and designating it as something only fit for curiosity-seekers or revivalists. But although the present moment can exclude the past from relevance, it can’t erase its influence entirely. Each era finds something new to return to; things that seemed out of date have a way of coming back in new forms, and revealing aspects of themselves we might not have noticed before. I think there’s something human in sheet music, something that doesn’t depend on technology to facilitate it—it’s a way of opening music up to what someone else is able to bring to it. That instability is what ultimately drew me to this project.
The opening up of the music, the possibility of letting people work with these songs in different ways, and of allowing them a different accessibility than what’s offered by all the many forms of music available today, is ultimately what this collection aims for. The songs here come with piano arrangements and guitar chords—as well as parts for brass instruments, in one case, and ukulele chords, in others—but personalizing and even ignoring the arrangements is encouraged. Don’t feel beholden to what’s notated. Use any instrument you want to. Change the chords; rephrase the melodies. Keep only the lyrics, if desired. Play it fast or slow, swung or straight. Take a song and make it an instrumental or an a cappella. Play it for friends, or only for yourself. These arrangements are starting-off points; they don’t originate from any definitive recording or performance.’
So the staff of the New Yorker took the challenge and recorded a new Beck’s song for our own enjoyment, and ‘Old Shanghai’ truly sounds like an old Beck’s tune – may be from the ‘Mutations’ era? – with a retro undertone,… but is it a new classic?