‎Beck

The first album covered by Beck’s Record Club was The Velvet Underground & Nico. In 1999, Beck contributed to a tribute album for Bruce Haack and Esther Nelson and their label Dimension 5 Records. The track was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance for the 65th Grammy Awards later in 2022. The experimental pop-fused record received generally positive reviews from critics. Upon receiving the Album of the Year award, the album beat out Pharrell Williams’s G I R L, Beyoncé’s self-titled album, Sam Smith’s In the Lonely Hour, and Ed Sheeran’s x. The idea of Song Reader came about nearly fifteen years prior, shortly after the release of Odelay.

• Virtually an unknown to the public and an enigma to those who met him, Beck would hop onstage between acts in local clubs and play “strange folk songs”, accompanied by “what could best be described as performance art” while sometimes wearing a Star Wars stormtrooper mask.
• Beck also appeared as himself in the 2017 film The Circle, giving a musical performance of the song “Dreams”.
• All the while, his high-energy live sets became the stuff of Lollapalooza legend, and his eye-catching videos were staples of MTV.
• Soon after, on July 7, Beck announced that his website would be featuring “extended informal conversations with musicians, artists, filmmakers, and other various persons” in a section called Irrelevant Topics.
• In the studio, Beck and producers studied contemporary hip hop and R&B, specifically R.

Beck met someone who offered to help record demos in his living room, and he began to pass cassette tapes around. In order to keep indifferent audiences engaged in his music, Beck would play in a spontaneous, joking manner. Beck was roommates with Paleface, sleeping on his couch and attending open mic nights together. Beck eventually began to frequent Manhattan’s Lower East Side and stumbled upon the tail end of the East Village’s anti-folk scene’s first wave. He spent the summer attempting to find a job and a place to live with little success. He began performing on city buses, often covering Mississippi John Hurt alongside original, sometimes improvisational compositions.

Personal life

The first contemporary music that made a direct connection with Beck was hip hop, which he first heard on Grandmaster Flash records in the early 1980s. Returning to Los Angeles in the early 1990s, he saw his commercial breakthrough with his 1993 single “Loser.” After signing with DGC Records, the song peaked at number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 and served as lead single for his third album and major label debut, Mellow Gold (1994). He has musically encompassed folk, funk, soul, hip hop, electronica, alternative rock, country, and psychedelia.

In the summer of 1994, Beck was struggling and many of his fellow musicians thought he had lost his way. Beck expressed a loose interest in hip hop and Rothrock introduced him to Carl Stephenson, a record producer for Rap-A-Lot Records. “I’d be banging away on a Son House tune and the whole audience would be talking. So maybe out of desperation or boredom, or the audience’s boredom, I’d make up these ridiculous songs just to see if people were listening,” he later remarked. Beck became involved in a loose posse of acoustic musicians—including Cindy Lee Berryhill, Kirk Kelly, Paleface, and Lach headed by Roger Manning—whose raggedness and eccentricity placed them well outside the acoustic mainstream. Beck began as a folk musician, switching between country blues, Delta blues, and more traditional rural khelaghor bet folk music in his teenage years.

Feeling his previous releases were just collections of demos recorded over the course of several years, Beck desired to enter the studio and record an album in a continuous linear fashion, which became Odelay. By the time Beck released his first album for Geffen, the low-budget, genre-blending Mellow Gold on March 1, “Loser” was already in the top 40 and its video in MTV’s Buzz Bin. Virtually an unknown to the public and an enigma to those who met him, Beck would hop onstage between acts in local clubs and play “strange folk songs”, accompanied by “what could best be described as performance art” while sometimes wearing a Star Wars stormtrooper mask. Two of Beck’s most popular and acclaimed recordings are Odelay and Sea Change, both of which were ranked on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.

Radiohead

Beck sustained a spinal injury while filming the music video for 2005’s “E-Pro”. Since the early 1980s, she has been married to Chicano artist and media maker Sean Carrillo, a member of the performance art group ASCO, who became Beck’s stepfather at age 22 when the musician was twelve years old. He publicly acknowledged his affiliation for the first time in a New York Times Magazine interview on March 6, 2005. Beck’s nine-year relationship with designer Leigh Limon and their breakup is said to have inspired his 2002 album Sea Change. Pitchfork Media applauded Midnite Vultures, saying, “Beck wonderfully blends Prince, Talking Heads, Paul’s Boutique, ‘Shake Your Bon-Bon’, and Mathlete on Midnite Vultures, his most consistent and playful album yet.” The review commented that his mix of “goofy piety and ambiguous intent” helped the album.

Beck has contributed three new songs—”Cities”, “Touch the People” and “Spiral Staircase”—to the video game Sound Shapes for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation Vita. In 2011, he collaborated with Seu Jorge on a track titled “Tropicália (Mario C. 2011 Remix)” for the Red Hot Organization’s charitable album Red Hot+Rio 2, a follow-up to the 1996 album Red Hot + Rio. Beck wrote the music, co-wrote the lyrics, and produced and mixed the album. Then, on July 12, he added a section called Videotheque, which he said would contain “promotional videos from each album, as well as live clips, TV show appearances and other rarities”. Soon after, on July 7, Beck announced that his website would be featuring “extended informal conversations with musicians, artists, filmmakers, and other various persons” in a section called Irrelevant Topics. Beck co-wrote and performed on the song “Flavor”, from the 1994 Jon Spencer Blues Explosion album Orange.

In late February 2010, it was announced that electronic artist Tobacco of Black Moth Super Rainbow had collaborated with Beck on two songs, “Fresh Hex” and “Grape Aerosmith”, on his upcoming album Maniac Meat. Also in 2009, Beck collaborated with Charlotte Gainsbourg on her album IRM, which was released in January 2010. Starting on June 18, the club began posting covers of songs from the album on Thursday evenings, each with its own video.

Song Reader, a project Beck released in December 2012, is 20 songs presented only as sheet music, in the hopes that enterprising musicians will record their own versions. On 29 January, 2026, Beck announced the compilation album Everybody’s Gotta Learn Sometimes, curating a collection of rarities, deep cuts and cover versions, including previously unreleased recordings of “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “True Love Will Find You in the End”. Beck described the recording process as “painful”, noting that he edited down songs constantly and he perhaps recorded the album three times. Godrich was leaving the United States for England in a short time, which led to the album’s quick production schedule—”No looking back, no doctoring anything.” The whole point of the record was to capture the performance of the musicians live, an uncharacteristic far-cry from the cut-and-paste aesthetic of Odelay. He has released 15 studio albums, as well as several non-album singles and a book of sheet music.