No stranger to off the wall album releases (remember The Information and its "design your own album cover" sticker set?), Beck has just announced his proper follow-up to 2008's Modern Guilt and, well… might want to dust up on your music theory. As revealed via press release earlier this afternoon, Beck has teamed up with publishing house McSweeney's on Beck Hansen's Song Reader, a collection of "twenty songs existing only as individual pieces of sheet music, never before released or recorded."
| Listen Up: Beck Feat. Jack White – "I Just Started Hating Some People Today" |
As described in the release:
"Complete with full-color, heyday-of- home-play-inspired art for each song and a lavishly produced hardcover carrying case (and, when necessary, ukelele notation), the Song Reader is an experiment in what an album can be at the end of 2012-- an alternative that enlists the listener in the tone of every track, and that’s as visually absorbing as a dozen gatefold LPs put together.
"The songs here are as unfailingly exciting as you’d expect from their author, but if you want to hear 'Do We? We Do,' or 'Don't Act Like Your Heart Isn't Hard,' bringing them to life depends on you."
So, um, yeah. Want to hear a new Beck album? Play your own new Beck album! It's sort of an ingenious way to weasel out of all those endless hours holed up in a recording studio. Who knows what Beck will do with all that time he's saved? Take up parasailing, maybe. In any case, Beck Hansen's Song Reader will be out this December and feature a whole slew of exclusive original new artwork, an intro by New York Times writer Jody Rosen and a forward by Beck himself. Years of piano lessons, presumably, will be sold separately. It's either the laziest or most brilliant release strategy in years. Haven't quite decided which. Probably both.
Is anyone else amused/annoyed/baffled by Beck's latest creative venture? Get the conversation started in our comments section below. First comment wins a free piano lesson with yours truly… for better or worse. (Mostly worse.)
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[Consequence Of Sound]
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