Beck's Ride Lonesome closes Sea Change trilogy — SkimNews
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- Beck releases Ride Lonesome to complete a trilogy begun with 2002's Sea Change and continued by 2014's Morning Phase, the latter of which won album of the year and three Grammys and was widely called his best work.
- The album reunites the Sea Change and Morning Phase team, with mixer Nigel Godrich, orchestrator and Beck's father David Campbell, and the same backing musicians returning.
- Ride Lonesome arrives seven years after 2019's Hyperspace, the Pharrell Williams-produced, synth-heavy and vaporwave-influenced album Beck appeared to disavow in a New Yorker interview: "When I try to shoe-horn my life into a song, it gets really ham-fisted."
- Beck describes the recording process as marked by stringent quality control, with songs recorded, set aside for years, then reconsidered, and "a huge amount of material" discarded — audible, the review argues, in tracks from "sparse country-rock" to "lush, harmony-drenched" arrangements.
- The record channels Nick Drake and arranger Robert Kirby (most visibly on In the Night), and recasts the Sea Change/Morning Phase motif of late-night, solitary driving on Run Away — the latest from a "noticeably older artist" Beck, now in his mid-50s.
- The review concludes that Ride Lonesome does little to dispel the theory that Beck's best work is born of unhappiness — but that consolation lies in it being "that rarest of things: a sequel to a sequel that's every bit as good as its predecessors."
Why it matters: Beck's breakup-era albums Sea Change and Morning Phase won album of the year and three Grammys combined, and critics have long theorized his best work emerges from personal heartache. After 2019's Pharrell-produced Hyperspace seemed to retire that streak, Ride Lonesome reteams him with Nigel Godrich and David Campbell — confirming the trilogy isn't closed, and that Beck has chosen to deepen it from a mid-50s vantage of accumulated weariness.
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