If you follow Beck’s Record club, you already know that Beck meets with musician friends to record an album in a day, and ‘Kick’ of INXS, ‘The Velvet Underground & Nico’, ‘Oar of Skip Spence, and ‘Songs Of Leonard Cohen’ have already been loosely reinterpreted with the help of Jeff Tweedy, Jamie Lidell, Glenn Kotche, Spencer Tweedy, Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Brian Lebarton, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Holmes, Thorunn Magnusdottir, Leslie Feist, Nels Cline, Mikael Jorgensen, Pat Sansone, John Stirratt, Devendra Banhart, Ben Goldwasser, Andrew Vanwyngarden, Binki Shapiro, and Beck
Today Beck’s club takes on Yanni’s ‘Santorini’ from the 1994 album ‘Live at the Acropolis’,… yes Yanni, that long-hair-Tom-Selleck-mustached-Greek guy who composes new age siruped piano music wrapped in pseudo-symphonic pompous arrangements, I wonder what Beck was thinking!
For ‘Santorini’, Beck got the help of Thurston Moore (Sonic Youth) and members of eclectic Chicago ensemble Tortoise, and I must say Yanni’s fans are going to be very disappointed! Gone the magniloquence, the theatrical delivery, and the imperious rendition with the 6 superposed keyboards and 30 violins.
But they have added lyrics! And funny ones, that have no sense at all, but the music did not make sense in the first place, so it’s appropriate: ‘Burn it up baby/I got a brand new pack of matches/I’m ready to set fire to this crazy city!’… ‘roasted pigs’…‘Orange, orange disaster’…’I’m going back to Africa’. The lyrics are improvised by Thurston Moore.
Beck says that ‘The new lyrics give the track an added urgency and pathos’, sure, it makes sense now.
Beck’s website will post one song every week for the rest of the summer, and there are 11 tracks on the album, I have checked! It’s gonna be a Yanni summer.
Next year, Beck and his clique should cover Kenny G or Michael Bolton’ s ‘Greatest Hits’.
If you dare to listen to the song, go there and be sure to check next week: