Beck!

I've been a Beck fan for many years, and was excited to find out he was planning some tour dates this summer.  In fact, he just performed in Wantagh, NY in a one-off Americanarama appearance.  He even performed his '93 hit single "Loser" with Wilco!  I thought he refused to play that live.

He clearly has widely varying musical influences, which is part of what makes his music so interesting.  He's also responsible for such unique lyrics as, "Egos drone/and pose alone" (from "Bottle of Blues"); "These withered hands/Have dug for a dream/Sifted through sand and leftover nightmares" (from "We Live Again"); and "I've been drifting on this wave so long/I don't know if it's already crashed on the shore" (from "Volcano").

Beck has not one but two brand new albums in store soon, the first one acoustic and the other described as the proper follow-up to his last studio album, 2008's Modern Guilt.  He will release these albums independently, and this summer he put out two standalone singles, "Defriended" and "I Won't Be Long."  His previous project, Beck Hansen's Song Reader, was entirely sheet music-based--innovative, but I didn't learn the songs myself!  He performed the songs from it in a London concert on July 4th with various guests such as Franz Ferdinand and Beth Orton.

Tomorrow, Beck plays at the Bank of America Pavilion in Boston--a venue I've frequented for quite a few summers now, an open-air, large-but-not-too-large-seeming place near the water.  I was curious what to expect so I looked online and found that while Beck's shows so far this summer have been acoustic, we should expect an electric, full-band show in Boston (as well as in Brooklyn two days later).