Back in late 2012, Beck released a volume of sheet music, a limited edition album housed between hard covers. His intentions? To fondly recall the era of written scores in the age of viral YouTube covers. To toy with the idea of what a song is, sidelining the idea of a definitive recording and instead inviting wide interpretation. To do something less predictable than just put a record out (although Beck recently did that too, with Morning Phase). Like Jack White and Neil Young, two fellow old Americana hands who are as minxish about process as they are rootsy about product, Beck looked back to the dissemination of popular music before widespread electrical audio and saw the opportunity for fun. Beck-sceptics, by contrast, rolled their eyes at the whole interactive "meta" entitlement of it.
Accordingly, these 20 Beck compositions had – and retain – a jaunty, pre-rock, Americana feel and a more universal lyrical bent than some of Beck's better-known works. A song about going off to war, America, Here's My Boy, could play like patriotic claptrap, or, as soul maverick Swamp Dogg does it on this all-star recording, as an anguished indictment of taking someone's beloved son for cannon fodder.
On release of the sheet music, one fellow critic played most of Song Reader on his piano by way of review. Other people uploaded their own Song Reader performances to YouTube or the dedicated website; you could argue that Song Reader: The Star-Studded Iteration is superfluous given the, ahem, crowd-sourced riches out there. Some recall a more middlebrow X Factor showreel. But some are really very good, such as semi-pro Sarah Rabdau's submission of Please Leave a Light On When You Go.
The Song Reader exercise further unfolded into concerts in London and the US; some of the great and good from the gigs have recorded their contributions, alongside some of the up and the coming. The album may vaunt such selling points as "comedian" Jack Black sinisterly hamming it up on We All Wear Cloaks, but it starts on a pleasant shrug with LA folk-soul newcomer Moses Sumney, who only really gets into his stride around the four-minute mark.
To say this is a mixed bag is a moot point. But perhaps it is not actually mixed enough. Anyone keen to hear from big guns such as Jack White (on I'm Down, hilarious as ever, vamping lines such as: "I fixed the spelling on a suicide note") or Jeff Tweedy (playing The Wolf is on the Hill for succour, not dread), Laura Marling (serene on Sorry) or Jarvis Cocker (arch as ever on Eyes That Say "I Love You") will find their entries perfectly satisfying and worth shelling out for. Beck even plays one – Heaven's Ladder.
Former New York Doll David Johansen delivers Rough on Rats like a caricature of Tom Waits, but at no point – not even when there's the mention of "shattered glass on the dancefloor" or "burlap flowers in the cocaine dirt" – does this feel anything other than an exercise in backwards-facing entertainment. There are highly listenable things going on here – ragtime piano, farty sax solos; Jason Isbell's raucous southern rock way with Now That Your Dollar Bills Have Sprouted Wings.
But ultimately, it's a risk-free album of covers: accomplished, certainly, but hardly a novel experiment. There remains a sense that no song reader has taken quite enough of a leap out of their musical armchair.
