Beck - Leave Me on the Moon - Non-Album Tracks (1995)

I've posted a lot of Beck material from the 1990s already, and I'd like to move on to the 2000s. But there's still more stray tracks of his from the 1990s I should get to first, to be systematic about it.

Here's yet another album that could have been. The songs all have two things in common: 1) they are done acoustically, and 2) they're from 1995. That's the year between "Mellow Gold" and "Odelay" when he didn't release anything. But this album is nothing like either of those. Five of the 14 songs are covers of traditional tunes ("Devil Got My Woman," "Grinnin' in Your Face," "John the Revelator," "Waiting for a Train," and "John Hardy.") Of the originals, most are obscure. Most of the songs here are taken from radio shows, and he used those to try out songs that he sometimes never played in concerts at all.

Some songs did get repeated elsewhere there. For instance, "Canceled Check" appeared on his 1998 album "Mutations." But this version is very different, since it's just him and an acoustic guitar. "It's All in Your Mind" both appeared on the deluxe version of the 1994 album "One Foot in the Grave" and the 2002 album "Sea Change." This version is from the 1995 Bridge School benefit concert, and was released on an official compilation of performances from various Bridge School shows. A different version of "Leave Me on the Moon" was on the "One Foot in the Grave" deluxe edition as well. Also, a studio version of the cover "Devil Got My Woman" was a B-side in 1997. "Waiting for a Train" was done on the 1994 album "Stereopathic Soul Manure," but that was more on a snippet, one minute long, whereas this is the full song.

So this is a bit of a grab bag of different things. But at its heart you have an album of mostly original acoustic material that could have been the heart of a 1995 album. However, he probably avoided doing that because everyone expected big things to follow "Mellow Gold," and a low-key acoustic effort would have been seen as a let down. In retrospect though, it's yet more quality Beck music.

Oh, by the way, I've made a lot of edits to these songs. Since most of them come from radio shows, he often would introduce each one with a little bit of talk, often just a single sentence to say what the song title was. I cut all that out, so the focus could be on the music. And for the song "Grinnin' in Your Face," it ended very abruptly, due to the radio show time slot coming to an end. Rather than have a fast fade out pretty much the same second Beck stops singing, I recycled a snippet of instrumental music from earlier in the song that extends the song about 20 seconds. The song is very short, only a minute long, so making it a bit longer helped some anyway, I think.

This album is 37 minutes long, not including the bonus track.

01 Devil Got My Woman (Beck)
02 Woe on Me [Feel the Strain of Sorrow Never Ceasing] (Beck)
03 Canceled Check (Beck)
04 Grinnin' in Your Face [Edit] [Piano Version] (Beck)
05 Curses (Beck)
06 John the Revelator (Beck)
07 Spirits (Beck)
08 Twig (Beck & Chris Ballew)
09 Leave Me on the Moon (Beck)
10 Waiting for a Train (Beck)
11 Sticks and Stones (Beck)
12 Sleeping Bag (Beck)
13 John Hardy (Beck)
14 It's All in Your Mind (Beck)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15252574/BeckH_1995_LeavMeontheMoon_atse.zip.html

For the album cover, I used a cover of a bootleg and changed the text.