The last time Beck released an album it was 2019 and the singer-songwriter found himself in a strange and unenviable position. In some quarters, the arrival of Hyperspace was eagerly anticipated precisely because his personal life was in turmoil. Nine months before its release, his 15-year marriage to actor Marissa Ribisi had ended in divorce, an experience he understandably described as heartbreaking. Unfortunately for him, there exists a pervasive argument that Beck’s greatest work is born out of misery.
His beloved 2002 album Sea Change featured a set of disconsolate acoustic songs written in the wake of a break-up with his long-term girlfriend Leigh Limon that Beck had initially thought were too personal for public consumption. They were certainly very different from the knowing, postmodern approach with which he’d made his name, but no matter: Sea Change went on to become a huge critical and commercial success. It wasn’t entirely clear what prompted the gloomy mood of 2014’s Morning Phase, but it very much seemed to be cut from similar musical and lyrical cloth. Some critics suggested it was the best album of his career; it subsequently won three Grammys, including album of the year. Given the circumstances, there was much pre-release speculation that Hyperspace would be a companion piece.
Instead, Hyperspace was synth-heavy, produced by Pharrell Williams and clearly influenced by vaporwave: its tone was dreamily buoyant and noticeably light on wracked soul-bearing. After its release, Beck seemed to tacitly suggest to fans of Sea Change and Morning Phase that there wouldn’t be any more where they came from. “When I try to shoe-horn my life into a song,” he told the New Yorker, “it gets really ham-fisted.”
Seven years on, he appears to have reconsidered. The first thing you hear on Ride Lonesome is a softly strummed acoustic guitar, echoey pedal steel and Beck’s voice. “Walk away, hang your head on the hollow moon,” he sings, as the album’s title track gets under way: should there be any lingering doubt about the mood it’s intent on evoking, it goes on to reference Julie London’s Cry Me a River and Johnny Thunders’ You Can’t Put Your Arms Around a Memory. “It feels like I’ve been here before,” he sings on Bleed, as strings gently rise and fall around him.
He certainly has. There’s an intentionality about the way Ride Lonesome reconvenes the team responsible for Sea Change and Morning Phase – the former’s producer Nigel Godrich is once more behind the mixing desk, the backing musicians who appear on both albums are present and correct, the orchestrations are the work of Beck’s father David Campbell – and about the artists the music here evokes. As on Sea Change’s Round the Bend and Morning Phase’s Heart Is a Drum, the ghosts of Nick Drake and his string arranger Robert Kirby are very clearly summoned up, most noticeably on In the Night. On Run Away, we find Beck exactly where he was on Sea Change’s The Golden Age and Morning Phase’s Unforgiven: alone, behind the wheel of a car in the small hours, aimlessly driving around in an attempt to assuage his unhappiness.
Similar sound, similar mood, similar lyrical themes: of course, the danger is of diminishing returns. But Ride Lonesome never feels like a pale imitation or a craven attempt to recapture past glories. That’s partly because of the standard of the songwriting. Beck has suggested that one reason the album took so long to make is because of stringent quality control: songs were recorded, then set aside for years, then reconsidered, a huge amount of material was discarded. You can tell: everything here, from the sparse country-rock of Slow Canyon to the lush, harmony-drenched Falling Through My Hands is melodically exquisite; every song has the requisite emotional impact.
But it’s also because Ride Lonesome is clearly an album made by a noticeably older artist than either of its predecessors: its mood is marked not just by the collapse of a relationship, but a sense of time passing, of things – to borrow a phrase from Nick Drake – moving just a little too fast. “I don’t know where I’m going,” he sings on Bleed, as strings gently rise and fall around him, “but it feels like I’ve been here before”: a neat capturing of a very mid-50s kind of malaise. An affecting sense of weariness seeps into everything, even the ostensibly optimistic – and utterly lovely – closer Beyond the Light comes filled with evocations of lost “nameless days” and of “the dying of the light”.
Unfortunately for Beck, Ride Lonesome does little to dispel the aforementioned theory about his best work being born out of unhappiness. There’ll be consolation in the fact it’s also that rarest of things: a sequel to a sequel that’s every bit as good as its predecessors.
• Ride Lonesome is released on 18 September
