In this ludicrously high-tech era of Spotify, iTunes and YouTube, where all genres of music are accessible almost anywhere at the touch of a button, it’s worth remembering that, within living memory, the only way people used to be able to hear new music was by playing it themselves on a piano or guitar. It was with this in mind that the hugely talented Beck Hansen released Song Reader in 2012 through ultra-hip publishers McSweeney’s: a book of sheet music containing 20 songs and more than 100 pages of artworks.
A winning play by Beck, really. Probably best known for slacker anthem ‘Loser’, this was about as lazy as it got. If you wanted to hear these songs.. you had to play them yourself. Ha! In that same slacker spirit, this reviewer would like to say that if you want these songs analysed, you can analyse them yourselves. Ha, ha!
Hundreds of musicians have recorded the material, and there have been various live performances and interpretations, over the last two years. So here’s the compilation album. Ranging in styles across folk, pop and rock, it features the
likes of Jack White, Laura Marling and Jarvis Cocker, alongside lesser known lights such as Swamp Dogg, Marc Ribot and Juanes.
It’s a hit and miss affair, occasionally patchy and sometimes brilliant. Beck performs only one song himself – the psychedelic Beatles-influenced ‘Heaven’s Ladder’. No offence to the other artists, but it’s good enough to make you wish he’d just recorded the fucking thing all the way through. Still, this is an interestingly diverse collection.
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