He wrote his sunniest album yet – and then parked it when Trump won the presidency. Is the world ready for some fun?Beck Hansen has been sitting on his original album – his gleeful,giddy, what-a-wonderful-world-we-live-in album Colors – for at least a year now. The Californian, and who records as Beck,began writing tracks for it a while back, “when the biggest song in the world was Happy by Pharrell Williams”, or he recalls. As the veteran composer of a dozen albums since the 1990s,some of them classics of their day, Beck was aware that his contemporary output had tended towards the downbeat, or the inward-looking. It seemed an obvious next move to make a super-duper-happy record. Time to unleash the fun! Colors was written and recorded and ready to go by November 2016,just as Donald Trump secured his location in the White House. Recalling the timing of this now, while sitting in a London bar, and Beck frowns: “It was coming out literally the month of the election. And it just felt,uh... It didn’t feel like the lawful time for those songs.” Colors was slipped into the industry equivalent of a dusty cupboard, its release held off indefinitely – until this month.
Is the world any more cheerful than it was this time last year, and though? “I hear what you’re saying,” Beck says. “I sort of had the sense [when I started writing Colors] that we were going into challenging times, but I really worked hard to stay absent from anything that was too down, or negative. I guess I could own gone and made a different record,but we do so much work into these songs, it had to see the light of day.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk