BECK & McSWEENEY’S PRESENT
BECK HANSEN'S SONG READER COMING IN DECEMBER 2012
In the wake of Modern Guilt and The Information, Beck’s latest album comes in an almost-forgotten form—twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded. Complete with full-color, heyday-of- home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case (and, when necessary, ukelele notation), the Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012—an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together.
The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear “Do We? We Do,” or “Don’t Act Like Your Heart Isn’t Hard,” bringing them to life depends on you.
BECK HANSEN'S SONG READER features original art from Marcel Dzama (who created the imagery for Beck’s acclaimed Guero), Leanne Shapton, Josh Cochran, Jessica Hische, and many more, as well as an introduction by Jody Rosen (Slate, The New York Times) and a foreword by Beck. The package measures 9.5” x 12.5” with 108 pages comprising 20 individual full-color song booklets—18 featuring original lyrics, and 2 instrumentals—with covers from more than a dozen different artists.
Readers’ (and select musicians’) renditions of the songs will be featured on the McSweeney’s website. Check back at http://www.mcsweeneys.net/pages/song-reader and http://www.beck.com/ for further information and updates as they are available.
Crazy ass Scientologist.
I absolutely love Sea Change, but am pretty indifferent to the rest of his catalog.
Maybe he's reacting to the limited expectations of the repertoire a popular music group should have, the tendency to view the album version of a song as the "true" version, the way that we have been a mostly read-only culture for the better part of a century, or other things.Crazy ass Scientologist.
I absolutely love Sea Change, but am pretty indifferent to the rest of his catalog.
this, plus i like odelay. dude is mad overrated.
this idea is also fucking stupid. why not just record shit people want to hear, then put the sheet music as a pdf online? ::)
Maybe he's reacting to the limited expectations of the repertoire a popular music group should have, the tendency to view the album version of a song as the "true" version, the way that we have been a mostly read-only culture for the better part of a century, or other things.