“CERTAIN SONGS,” Beck told me the next afternoon in Venice, Calif., in a little studio where he’s been finishing his new record, “inexplicably just connect in a visceral way that isn’t really explainable. You know what I mean? I’ve wondered sometimes — since there isn’t really much record of music past the last few thousand years — if there is some deep memory of music, melodies in there that maybe somehow re-emerge or relate to something that we know already. There must be forgotten melodies.”
Beck’s own evolutionary history as a musician has its roots in various epochs of the American past. “I wasn’t a kid in the garage learning Zeppelin riffs or how to play the Eddie Van Halen part,” he told me. “I was trying to figure out how to do Blind Willie Johnson and these impossible blues players.” No less than the blues, early hip-hop was a defining influence, and the intersection of these idioms is easy to listen to in his first hit, “Loser” (1993), with its slide guitar loop and its kick-snare beat.
