Jeff Beck Talks Moving Past ‘Guitar Nerd’ Albums on New LP
Some of the album’s lyrics, which his vocal counterpart wrote after discussing some of his ideas with her, revolve around television and the way people interpret reality TV. And with tunes like “The Ballad of the Jersey Wives,” he seems to be making a statement about society.
When Rolling Stone asks if he means the LP to be a protest album, he demurs. “It’s an observation,” he says. “It’s what you make of it, but I do observe. I can’t think of a way to make a statement without getting too explicit, so it skims what it is, but you’re on the right track.”
Then he homes in on the reality-TV component. “It’s undeniable when she sings, ‘plastic fantastic little creatures,’ it’s complaining about the plasticity of reality shows like American Idol and all this, where 99.5 percent of it is just crap and you should never be exposed to it, just to get that little morsel of talent. That, to me, is just the worst, so that’s my little poke at that. I don’t see why I shouldn’t voice an opinion.”
Beck wrote and recorded most of the album at his home, he says, next to a fire and with a bottle of Prosecco. One of their other collaborators, who’d recorded demos of the songs, wrote drum-machine parts, much of which they later replaced with real drums. “There’s no synthesizers,” he told the audience. “I wasn’t having any of that.” There are, however, some phrases he wrote on his mother’s baby grand piano.
He tells Rolling Stone that by writing the record as a unit, his guitar parts – from his signature trembling solos to his raunchy blues riffs – all came about innately. “If it doesn’t come naturally, it doesn’t go on the album,” he says. “I maybe struggled a little with ‘The Shrine,’ which has a very country sound, almost like Merle Haggard. But it mostly came together like a textbook college band, where we’d sit down with a beer or two and there was an openness about it. What you hear is the most genuine result that I could come up with rather than a bunch of musos sitting around trying to gas each other out with as many notes as they could possibly play.”
“I’ve been listening to some really deep club stuff from Ibiza.”
Even the funky, Hendrixy parts were just born from simple riffs. “[My fellow musicians] weren’t in the league of John McLaughlin in terms of understanding complex rhythms and strange chord shapes,” he says. As for the record’s electronic elements, he took some inspiration from Brazilian electronic producer Amon Tobin. “I’ve been listening to some really deep club stuff from Ibiza, and I’ve been thinking, ‘What a waste of a good drum sound,'” he told the audience. With Rolling Stone, he also cites Kurdish music as an inspiration. “I’m not going to shut down my opinion of music or badmouth music just because it comes from a place that is causing trouble,” he says. “If the music’s fantastic, I will take my hat off to it. Political incorrectness is my middle name, you know.”
Beck has yet to settle on a title for the record yet. But what he does know is that the record – whatever it’s called – will come out on July 15th, and he’ll be following it with a tour that he’s co-headlining with Buddy Guy.