I jumped the gun by writing my remembrance timed to the 20th anniversary of its recording, but this was the week in 2002 when Beck released Sea Change, his epic breakup album. Think Nick Drake on Benzedrine. I wrote about the post-9/11 vibe shift it represented in the culture, and what it meant for me personally:
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.
I remember the way my heart leapt when a beautiful young woman called out the bass line in “Paper Tiger” to me.
I tend to believe, and some data from Spotify seem to confirm, that rock and pop albums can imprint themselves in a peculiarly strong way on listeners who are roughly between the ages of 12 and 24. Sea Change was the last album that mattered to me in this way, and the last one that could.