I Just Read About That…

 SOUNDTRACK: BECK-“I Just Started Hating Some People Today” / “Blue Randy”(2012).

A few years ago, Beck suffered from a debilitating back injury that required spinal cord surgery.  This limited his output significantly over those years.  It also gave him a chance to re imagine releasing music.  And so around 2012 he started releasing singles with no albums attached.

This first one is a collaboration with Jack White and is and astonishingly traditional country song.

The song has big fiddles and twangy vocals.  Then the drums kick in and a big old bass notes sounds and…it’s even more country.  There are big, fun verses (about murder, naturally) and a slide guitar solo.

I honestly can’t tell what Jack White’s contribution is, but evidently it is “punk vocals.” And those punk vocals come near the end.  Because at 3:45, it turns into a blistering fun country punk mess, which lasts for just a few seconds.  And then it morphs into a weird, string-filled kinda sexy song with a hot-sounding lady telling us she’s going to kill us.

The straightness of the country is only weird because of the straightness of the punk at the end.  It’s clear Beck wanted to have fun with this track, and so he did.

The B-side is another country song.  This one is of a more spoken word quality, but it still has the country vibe (and slide guitar).  His voice sounds decidedly more country than I have heard from him.  Even Beck fans may be confused by just how country this is, and yet he definitely has country content in his earlier releases.

[READ: April 1, 2014] “The Navigator”

This is an interesting story that has a fascinating structure.  It seems like the story is told in third person.  It is the story of a man, Walter Ehrlich, who nearly died in 1972 when he caught pneumonia.  He had been swimming every day in Lake Ontario, but the doctors told him that that was unsafe, so he had a pool put in is backyard and he swam there every day that the winter didn’t freeze the water.

He also had a passion for ballrooms, and built one in his garage (this section is quite magical).

After a few paragraphs, the narrator reveals himself and the story is suddenly in first person.  The narrator knows about the man through his wife’s family.  Walter was close to his father-in-law (the story of how they met is also funny).  Indeed, there are photos of Walter visiting his wife’s family when she was just eight or nine years old. 

Walter has always been single.  He was a veteran of World War II (and knows the schedule for the planes that the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum demonstrates monthly).  During the war he was very close with Alex Snow.  The took some shore leave together, dancing in grand ballrooms to big band music.  They were in England during the war when Glenn Miller’s plane went down.  Later, when Snow died on a mission, Walter felt like a part of him was lost.

By the end of the story we learn what the narrator’s visit is all about.  The narrator’s wife has always felt that Walter was like a lighthouse for her–a source of help in dark times.  Since dark times had befallen them, they hoped for Walter’s advice.

I loved the way the story ended–with the way the visit did not end and then with the way it did.  There was something magical about the telling of this story and I enjoyed it very much.