Beck rose to fame in the early 1990s as an absurdist poet who mashed together blues, folk, and hip-hop while getting crazy with the Cheez Whiz. For most of his career, that was the default Beck, the real Beck. But is that right? According to the forthcoming book The Last Temptation of Beck, he used to crash stages between sets, usually when one band was breaking down and the other was plugging in, and he’d play a few songs on acoustic guitar and harmonica for a captive audience. Some of those songs were straight-faced covers of blues standards and some were straight-faced originals, and they were generally received by a chattering crowd who were more confused than amused. It was only when Beck started rapping non sequiturs that the bystanders shut up and took notice. That was the first Beck we paid attention to, the one with the leafblower and Stormtrooper helmet, the one who announced himself on the Bong Load 7″ of “Loser,” a surprise hit that caught even him off guard.
The 1990s chose that Beck from several different mutations he was tinkering with at the time, and when he veered from that persona it came as a surprise. Mutations in 1998 and Sea Change in 2002 were both noteworthy for their attempts to express something personal in a more straightforward musical mode—the manchild growing up, abandoning irony and shenanigans—but those albums were just warm-ups for 2014’s Morning Phase, when Beck went full country-rock for a record that sounded like waking up after a dark night of the soul. Fans old and new embraced this new version of Beck, and none of his subsequent albums have landed with quite the same impact. Morning Phase reintroduced him as a commercially viable artist and even nabbed the Album of the Year Grammy.
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Maybe a follow-up like Ride Lonesome was inevitable. After the more upbeat Colors in 2017 and Hyperspace in 2019, Beck once again picks up his acoustic guitar and dons his floppy folksinger hat. This version of Beck plies low-key musings about isolation and emotional alienation and arranges them in a way that balances loping country-folk with buoyant French pop (the bass is a lead instrument) and ’60s West Coast rock. With most of the musicians from Sea Change and Morning Phase returning, the songs settle comfortably into a familiar sound and a familiar version of Beck, right down to the relentless midtempo plod and the syrupy strings. Beck retreads rather than reconsiders those ideas, which makes Ride Lonesome sound like an album of foregone conclusions. “You’ve got to ride lonesome,” he sings on the title track. “You’ve got to cry a river, follow it all the way home… alone.”
But you don’t have to be alone, in bad times or in good. If you’re fortunate to have a support system—be it friends, family, coworkers, or mental health professionals—you should absolutely use it. This version of Beck can’t make those lines sound like the wisdom of experience. Instead, they sit there like something that would sound good in a country-folk song about loneliness and recovery. There’s a remove to these songs, a facsimile quality. Morning Phase played like an inner monologue: It was written mostly in first person, and even when Beck used the second person, it sounded like he was airing his own fears and doubts. On Ride Lonesome, however, he never seems to be singing about himself. His lyrics tend to be broad, at times hypothetical, curdling into questionable advice. “Ride into the storm, like a beast waiting to be born,” he muses on “Disappearing Act.” Rapped over a janky beat and an old blues sample, that line might have some goofy power. Sung over a swell of tasteful strings, it’s a cat-poster platitude.
