If you asked a bunch of Beck fans what their favourite record by their genre-flitting, multi-instrumental musical hero was, you might expect the majority to point to 1996's sample-hewn breakthrough Odelay. In actual fact, odds are that most would cite 2002’s heartbroken masterpiece Sea Change as ‘the one’.
The Nigel Godrich-produced beauty marked a significant moment of evolution for Beck, turning back from the various (and largely more exuberant) musical routes he’d already traversed and instead crafting a stripped back, yet cinematic portrayal of the stages of a relationship’s end.
Led by the scene-setting The Golden Age, the acoustic guitar-led record featured some of Beck’s most beloved songs of all time, including Lost Cause and Guess I’m Doing Fine.
“Nowadays, hardly anyone mentions Odelay to me. But they do talk about Sea Change” Beck told Mojo magazine in a new interview to mark the release of Ride Lonesome. Beck's new album is very much a spiritual successor to Sea Change and the similarly-toned ‘companion piece’, 2014 gem Morning Phase.
Although Ride Lonesome is already garnering similar praise to those emotion-rich records, Beck remembered that when he first started deviating from his more buoyant back catalogue, his label Geffen were more than a little perturbed.
By the late 1990s, the slacker-anthem Loser was already well in the rear-view mirror, with the skittish psychedelia of 1998’s Mutations and the uptempo Prince-esque strut of 1999’s Midnite Vultures causing Geffen to eye the former poster boy of bedroom lo-fi suspiciously.
“By the time I got to Sea Change the label was like, ‘We’re going to sue you because you’re not making music characteristic of Beck’” Beck told Mojo.
After a heated back and forth, eventually Geffen released Sea Change to sizeable critical and commercial success. Turned out that making ‘music characteristic of Beck’ would be something of a protean concept. In 2026, it still is.
As we stated in our exhaustive investigation into Sea Change’s recording last year, Sea Change was such a shift that it could easily have been the debut release of an entirely different artist.
Beck wasn’t content with being now solely known as an acoustic troubadour however, and further experimentalist records (Guero, The Information) and even full-blooded pop and synth-pop records (Colors and Hyperspace respectively) followed from the restless artist over the ensuing decades. Allegedly, Beck even has a massive quantity of unreleased music sitting in his archive. Genre unspecified…
“Beck is such an important musician for our generation,” says producer Nigel Godrich in the same Mojo piece. “But the funny thing is just by being this incredible genre-hopper, it’s almost like people don’t realise how great he is. If he’d only ever done Sea Change, Morning Phase and the new album, that would be a career in and of itself. But he’s such a musical sponge and wants to bring those things out and try everything. He’s been so many different people over the years.”
Read the full interview with Beck, Nigel Godrich and members of Beck's band in the new issue of Mojo
