Sea Change

Sea Change was Beck’s Blood On The Tracks: an acutely personal reflection on the end of an affair scored with desolate magnificence (lamenting strings, starbursts of guitar and miles of echo) and sung by the eternally boyish Beck in a manly, mortally wounded tenor.

Producer Nigel Godrich, fresh from the harrowing modernism of Radiohead’s KIDA, used pithy scarring electronics and desert-midnight suspense to heighten the pathos in songs like The Golden Age and Guess I’m Doing Fine. In turn, Beck — stripped of hip-hop pastiche and sampled clutter — finally sang like the Bob Dylan of his generation, with vivid, lonesome honesty.

Though “Sea Change” has become a quite common expression, the title of the album could also be a direct reference to Shakespeare’s play The Tempest, in which the character Ariel sings:

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.