Beck Opens His Record Club With Velvet Underground Album

Yes, we know Beck is a little too modern for the artists that we normally cover. As a matter of fact, using our current "standards," we'll start fully covering his music in 2019 (his first album came out in 1994); however, he and some fellow musicians are doing something that we consider so different that we had to report on it.

Beck is now free of the constraints of a contract with a major label (who would have thought anyone would ever see that as good), so he is starting out this new phase of his career with a major website overhaul and the creation of what he is calling the Record Club. We'll let Beck explain the concept in a quote from his website:

We've been working on changes to the website for the last few months. We'll be adding new sections as they're ready. The first one to be added is called Record Club, an informal meeting of various people to record an album in a day. An album will be chosen to be reinterpreted and used as a framework. Nothing rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track will be uploaded once a week on beck.com as well as through the web sites of those involved with the project.

For this first edition, after lengthy deliberation and coming close to covering Digital Underground's Sex Packets, all present voted in favor of the 'other' Underground's The Velvet Underground & Nico. Participants included this time around are Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Brian Lebarton, Bram Inscore, Yo, Giovanni Ribisi, Chris Holmes, and from Iceland, special guest Thorunn Magnusdottir, and myself. Thanks to everyone who helped put this together, and to all of you for indulging in this experiment. More soon.

To hear the excellent first song released from the album, Sunday Morning, head over to Beck's website.