Beck’s Long Ride Lonesome

Cometh the hour, cometh the moper. That, at least, was my immediate thought as soon as I heard the mournful acoustic guitar strum at the start of Beck Hansen’s latest album — his fifteenth — “Ride Lonesome.” Over a mixture of slide guitar, country-tinged melancholia, and Beck’s inimitably world-weary vocals, he tells a familiar tale on the title track, one that anyone who has been listening to his increasingly mournful albums since 2002’s “Sea Change” will be accustomed to.Beck has been left alone to, indeed, “ride lonesome” by an anonymous loved one (“She is gone, and you can’t put your arms around a memory.”) As the song — courtesy of many of the same musicians who played on the companion albums “Sea Change” and 2014’s “Morning Phase” — moves into its chorus (“You got to cry a river/And follow it all the way home/Alone”) it is very clear that this is business as usual for Beck. The musician is heartbroken, and we are to hear as to why, and how, this state of affairs has come about.If Beck was less talented, “Ride Lonesome” might sound somewhere between clichéd and old hat. And, indeed, “Ride Lonesome” itself doesn’t so much tip his hat to his earlier albums’ very similar opening songs, “The Golden Age” and “Cycle,” as revel in the remarkable consistency to them. If you wanted to delve into his musicianship, it is grimly fascinating to compare the relatively youthful 32-year-old Beck’s vocals on “The Golden Age” with the more weathered 56-year-old’s singing on “Ride Lonesome.” Yet there is an inevitable distance — which the album recognizes and leans into — between a young man thinking about heartbreak and a middle-aged man reflecting that the remaining decades of his life are likely to be lived on his own, forever lonesome.The cover of ‘Ride Lonesome,’ by Beck. AmazonThis is, naturally, well-worn territory for any number of American artists, whether it’s Hank Williams mournfully singing “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” or Leonard Cohen’s “Love Calls You by Your Name,” with its inimitably Cohen-esque reflection on “shouldering your loneliness like a gun that you will not learn to aim.” Yet Beck is not attempting to be Leonard Cohen, or, for that matter, Nick Cave, seeking to elevate songs of love and loss into existential duets with the Almighty. Instead, he is reflecting on how things appear to have gone very wrong in his life, with great dignity and beauty, over swelling string arrangements composed by his father David Campbell. The producer of “Sea Change,” Nigel Godrich, absent from “Morning Phase,” returns here on mixing duties, and his expansive influence can once again be felt.“Ride Lonesome” will undoubtedly be regarded as one of the year’s best albums, partly because it’s astonishingly, at times almost painfully, beautiful, with Beck now perfecting the sumptuous mixture of longing and loss that he excels at, and partly because there are remarkably few contemporary artists working at his level. If Father John Misty, aka Josh Tillman, were to lose the irony for a while, perhaps he would produce work of similar value, but in fact Beck’s closest comparison when it comes to middle-aged melancholia is The National, where Matt Berninger’s sorrowful vocals are counterpointed by Bryce Dessner’s similarly understated yet effective arrangements and orchestration.This, it seems, is where we’ve ended up with American alternative rock music: Multi-millionaires telling us how sad they are, as cellos and viola slither away in the background and electric guitars offer tastefully mournful accompaniment to the tearful lyrics.I am, it must be said, completely down for this, especially if it’s done as well as The National and Beck do it. But the difference between the two acts is that The National have been ploughing essentially the same furrow since they released their first, eponymous record in late 2001; whereas when Beck exploded onto the musical scene in the early Nineties with his songs “Loser” and “Where It’s At” from his breakthrough album “Odelay,” he seemed to be setting himself up as a white-boy version of Prince, reflecting a childhood spent around a mixture of hip-hop and country music.Beck pictured in Amsterdam , Netherlands, in 1996. Photo by Martyn Goodacre/Getty ImagesPerhaps if he had emerged in the early 2020s, an era far more suspicious about ideas of cultural appropriation, he would have struggled. But there was a lengthy period, thanks to albums such as “Odelay” and “Midnite Vultures,” and resulting MTV rotation, that the youthful Beck was one of the hippest artists in the world, with music that made people want to dance wildly. Those who could analyze the complex time signatures and arrangements that he was using might have seen him as rather more than a postmodern song-and-dance man, and so when he appeared to change style and approach entirely to become a lovesick troubadour on “Sea Change,”it was far less surprising than it might have once been. After all, Beck was — and is — an artist who is reluctant to be pigeonholed in any form and displays a willingness somewhat akin to his idol David Bowie to skip nimbly between forms and musical genres on every record he releases.Yet Beck now seems to have settled into this particular form of sighing sorrow, and he does it extraordinarily well. This melancholic musical weariness is reminiscent of his sublime single “Ramona,” written for the otherwise indifferent “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” movie in 2010. On “Ride Lonesome,” there is, on paper, a tendency to embrace self-parody, with songs entitled things such as “Bleed” and “Falling Through My Hands,” but the musicianship and songwriting are sufficiently strong for any suspicion of repetitiveness or rut-sticking to disappear immediately. Listening to this album is an experience that provides a wonderfully glum pleasure for its 48-minute running time, thanks to Beck’s own sumptuous production: as he sings of how “I know I died that night/And I’ll never be brought back to life,” the lyrical sentiments might be downbeat, even shocking, but the music that surrounds it is almost incongruously sumptuous. And, this time, there’s an almost uplifting coda, too. “Ride Lonesome” was inspired by his divorce from Marissa Ribisi, which was finalized in 2021, and he has not released an album since 2019’s “Hyperspace,” although he has continued to write and perform since then. It has clearly been an upsetting, traumatic time for Beck — and an expensive one, too, if leaked documents of his multi-million-dollar financial settlement are to be believed. But by this album’s finale, “Beyond the Light,” he seems to be coming to terms with his future life and the prospect of putting ghosts to rest in the future. While cynics might carp that a famously handsome, talented, and charismatic rock star is hardly going to have difficulty finding a new soulmate, there is something stirring in how he sings “You stand inside a diadem/Of all your nameless days/Where the rivers rise/To wash away your pain.” This beautiful exercise in catharsis may not wash away Beck’s pain, but reveling in his heartbreak remains our privilege.

Beck’s Long Ride Lonesome

Beck’s Long Ride Lonesome

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