Beck - Spiral Staircase - Non-Album Tracks (2010-2012)

It's been a long time since I last posted a stray tracks album from Beck. But I recently went through my entire Beck collection making audio fixes, so I hope to post a lot more of his stuff soon. Here's the next one in my long stray tracks series from him.

Beck is a prolific song writer. But, strangely, he didn't release any albums between 2008 and 2014, despite writing lots of songs in those years. This comes from the middle of those years. We don't know what lies in his private vaults, and there have been very little bootlegging of his studio material from this time period. So what we're left with are songs he did for various projects plus rarities played in concert. Many of the songs here are from movie soundtracks and various artists collections. Only one, "Ah Melody," is from a concert bootleg.

A few of the songs have been heavily edited, so they need some special explanation. The first two songs are rare cases of bootlegged studio material. Beck did a number of original songs for the "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World" movie, but these two didn't get included in the movie or the soundtrack. Both of them were very short, only about a minute long. I repeated some sections to make them long enough to come across as proper songs. Now, they're about two minutes long each.

"Silk Pillow" is a song that was a collaboration between Beck and Childish Gambino (a.k.a. Donald Glover). I removed a big chunk of the song in the middle that was pretty much all a Childish Gambino rap. I simply didn't like it that much, so this is very much a personal preference thing. 

In a similar way, Beck's song "NYC 73 - 78" is over 20 freakin' minutes long. I found that to be way, way too long, since it's not filled with instrumental solos or anything like that, mostly just lots of repetition. So I drastically cut it down to less than five minutes, the length of a normal song.

The songs "Cities" and "Spiral Staircase" present a highly unusual case. Both these songs, plus one more, "Touch the People" were recorded by Beck for the video game "Sound Shapes." They've never been released in any audio format, but one can hear them through the video game. However, there's a twist: the songs are broken into various pieces, and in the game you can put them together in any way you like to create your own versions of these songs. There's no definitive right version. 

I simply didn't like the song "Touch the People," which is a generic instrumental, so I didn't include that one. I found a mix of "Cities" that someone else did that I liked a lot, so I used that. (It was a long time ago, so I've lost track of whose version it was.) For "Spiral Staircase" though, I didn't find any version that I thought really nailed it. I didn't have the video game, but I took two different versions of the song that I found on YouTube and used audio editing software to make a version that worked for me.

By the way, the songs "Stormbringer," "Ah Melody," "Michelangelo Antonioni," and "Corrina, Corrina" are cover versions. "Michelangelo Antonioni" is by Brazilian musician Caetano Veloso, and his version is in Portuguese. Beck's version is very different in that the lyrics are in English. But I don't know if it's a straight translation or Beck's own lyrics or what.

The three bonus tracks are merely bonus tracks due to sound quality issues. "Nefertiti" and "Teeny Weeny Bobbie" as well as "Ah Melody" are Serge Gainsbourg songs that Beck played at a tribute concert. All three come from the same source, but for some reason I found the sound quality of "Ah Melody" good enough for the album, but the other two only good enough for bonus track status. For these songs, Beck generally sung in French.

01 Disgusting Rainbow [Edit] (Beck)
02 Gasoline Eyes [Edit] (Beck)
03 Stormbringer (Beck)
04 Iron Horse (Beck)
05 Curfew (Beck)
06 Ah Melody (Beck)
07 Looking for a Sign (Beck)
08 Silk Pillow [Edit] (Beck & Childish Gambino)
09 Cities (Beck)
10 Spiral Staircase (Beck)
11 Michelangelo Antonioni (Beck)
12 Corrina, Corrina (Beck)
13 NYC 73 - 78 [Edit] (Beck)

Nefertiti (Beck)
Pocahontas (Beck with Neil Young)
Teenie Weenie Boppie (Beck)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15127434/BeckH_2010-2012_SpirlStaircase_atse.zip.html

Once again, I was helped by PJ of the "Albums I Wish Existed" blog to make the album cover. Beck often has artistic covers instead of a photo of himself, so I decided to go for a literal interpretation of the "Spiral Staircase" album title. The art is by Barbara Berney. PJ added the text.