Adventures in Sadness

T wenty years ago, Bek David Campbell — better known to you as the musical artist Beck — entered Ocean Way studios in Hollywood to record a series of songs he wrote in a single-week bender after the bust-up of his relationship with stylist Leigh Limon. Reportedly she had cheated on him, and their engagement was ended. The ultimate breakup album of my lifetime (and probably yours) would be released that September under the name Sea Change.

In the months before recording, Beck had just finished up a tour in support of his late-1999 album Midnight Vultures. That album was a gonzo but reverent appropriation of black musical genres. In it Beck adopted R&B at its most sensual, ’90s hip-hop at its most crassly materialistic and braggadocious, and funk at its most drug-addled. Then he made it all nerdier. He approached this material with both a genius for arrangement, a motormouth’s recollection of Los Angeles County references, and an art student’s deranged intention to shock, horrify, and provoke laughter. A sample of the lyrics from his scornful “Hollywood Freaks”:

Hot milk
Mm, tweak my nipple
Champagne and Ripple
Shamans go cripple
My sales go triple
We drop lobotomy beats
Evaporated meats
On high-tech streets
We go solo
Dance floors and talk shows
Hot dogs, NoDoz
Hot sex in back rows.

Scornful-unless-you-wanna-do it. A thumping brass-filled funk chorus would suddenly be interrupted by a bluegrass banjo and synthesizer-led bridge. Midnight Vultures was disgusting, lascivious, funny, and undeniably fun. It was a Bahama Mama Slush Puppy of an album, but spiked with Viagra, Prozac, and Smirnoff Ice. The last great party of the 1990s, stretching into the new millennium. It must have been exhausting to perform across the entire record-buying earth.

All of this is to say, Sea Change was Beck’s post-9/11 vibe shift. The genius for elaborate arrangement and lush instrumentation was still there, but the genre was country and folk. It was as if Beck saw that memorable Volkwagen Cabrio ad, featuring Nick Drake’s song, “Pink Moon,” and decided he could top it.

Where the previous album had been all artifice, this was straightforward melancholy, mourning, and sadness. Sample lyrics, from “Guess I’m Doing Fine”:

There’s a blue bird at my window
I can’t hear the songs he sings
All the jewels in heaven
They don’t look the same to me
I just wade the tides that turned
Till I learn to leave the past behind
It’s only lies that I’m living
It’s only tears that I’m crying
It’s only you that I’m losing
Guess I’m doing fine.

At times throughout his career, Beck has revealed his fascination with and debt to David Bowie. But trying to get on top of Bowie’s biggest ideas has tended to diminish Beck. Sea Change’s open-hearted intimacy fits this artist best. The songs could be performed with orchestral backing, but they were built around simple folk patterns. Many of the songs were most effective just picked at. Here’s “Lost Cause”:

Musically, the most effective piece on the album was “Paper Tiger.” There are some familiar folk-Beck images in the lyrics: stray dogs, broken diamonds, and deserts. But the lush string arrangements that threaten to take the song away are held down by the prowling of a clean electric-guitar sound and an unforgettably sensuous, longing bass line. The album works because it traverses back and forth between the spare and simple songs such as “Already Dead” to tunes like “Little One” that reach for magnificence in their view of heartbreak as total shipwreck.

The album, produced by Nigel Godrich, was received deliriously by most critics, and it became an audiophile classic. It is best heard in the rare experimental formats that were vying to replace CDs — including Super Audio CDs and even a surround-sound DVD-audio mix that was made for the small niche of 5.1 home theater aficionados of the time. An audiophile-grade vinyl album now trades for hundreds of dollars on the secondary market.

On a personal note, this album could have ruined my young love life had it come out before I patched things up with my girlfriend at the time. Sea Change reflected a change in life for me, from the halcyon days of my teenage years in the 1990s to something more rotten and uncertain in the new millennium. I put the album on my Rio Riot MP3 player and used a cassette adapter to play it in the 1992 Saturn SL2. I’d open up the sunroof, make a left turn and watch the water that had leaked into the car from that sunroof spray out of the side window. Driving up and down the Taconic State Parkway late at night during an Indian summer, I would simply luxuriate in its melancholy and sadness. Lonesomeness at the right age can feel like its own adventure. The dark chasm inside the human heart can feel sublime. Longing and the possibility of loss give a kind of dignity to even the desires of a young fool, as I was then. Sea Change maps this terrain beautifully, and for 20 years, every so often, I go exploring in it again.