I’m the artist formally known as Beck. I have a genius wig. When I put that wig on, then the true genius emerges. I don’t have enough hair to be a genius. I think you have to have hair going everywhere. – Beck
There’s something different that happens when you’re writing a song for your own record that you know you’re going to sing. – Beck
Sometimes I’ll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else. – Beck
The repercussions of what you put out and what people gravitate to in your music never registered at all. I never had that thing that maybe other bands have – a specific idea of what they are and what their sound is. – Beck
In recording, you’re trying to make something work sonically – getting the right inflection on the right guitar sound – and maybe a part that would be musically great doesn’t sound as cool. On paper, though, it’s all stripped back. The musical idea is the one that wins. – Beck
What Spotify pays me is not even enough to pay the musicians playing with me or the people working on the discs. It’s not working. Something is going to have to give. – Beck
I enjoy the collaboration. I always envied people in bands who got to have that interaction. I’ve done so many albums where I’ve been in the studio for 14 hours a day for six months just trying to come up with things on my own. It’s a nice change helping other people with their music and not being all about what I’m trying to do myself. – Beck
The years keep going by and you realize, Wow. Doing these records is such a process: going on tour for a year and a half, then you get home and you want to do other things. – Beck
Being able to take musical ideas through every iteration is attractive to me. Granted, not everyone’s going to want to listen to that, but it should exist. – Beck
To me, ‘rock star’ conjures up something like a mystic: someone who sees himself as above other people, someone who has the key to the secret that people want to know. – Beck
Art is the child of Nature; yes, her darling child, in whom we trace the features of the mother’s face, her aspect and her attitude. – Beck
You have to shelve a lot of your inspiration. There’s only so much you can do with one record. – Beck
I hadn’t done much rapping in a while. I really wasn’t sure I was going to do that any more. For a couple years I thought I was done with that. It wasn’t really required of me. – Beck
Every time you go in, it’s like starting over. You don’t know how you did the other records. You’re learning all over. It’s some weird musician amnesia, or maybe the road wipes it out. – Beck
Tonight the city is full of morgues, and all the toilets are overflowing. There’s shopping malls coming out of the walls, as we walk out among the manure. That’s why I pay no mind. – Beck
I have heard some stuff that might be influenced by my records, but it’s usually pretty wacky and off-the-wall, which is kind of annoying, to be frank. – Beck
I never had any expectations of winning a Grammy. It wasn’t something I was set on, that I was hoping and praying and starving for. – Beck
In Japan, you get on the bullet train or the airplane, and I loved the little speeches the stewardesses would do. They even do little speeches before you play gigs. – Beck
We play a hip-hop song and suddenly 25 people on the left jump up and put their hands in the air; then you play Lost Cause and they’re like, I don’t know about this one. – Beck
You can’t meditate on walking or certain human habits. You concentrate too much on the way you walk, and you’ll start walking pretty weird. – Beck
As society changes, as politics change, as people change, certain songs still seem to resonate. – Beck
There are a lot of people who really abused sampling and gave it a bad name, by just taking people’s entire hit songs and rapping over them. It gave publishers license to get a little greedy. – Beck
I would love to do an electronic record. There’s just so much to see and do and try. And life goes by. – Beck
