Beck - Song Reader Live - Non-Album Tracks (2013)

In late 2012, Beck released a very strange music project. He hadn't released a proper studio album since 2008. But rather than release a new one of those, he released a book of sheet music, which he called "Song Reader." Apparently, he had become fascinated by the sheet music of the 1800s and the first couple decades of the 1900s, before radio or record players became popular. Back then, if you wanted to hear some music, you pretty much had to play it yourself or listen to someone else play it. The book contained the sheet music and/or artwork for dozens of songs, though many songs were just snippets or song titles.

In 2014, a various artists album also called "Song Reader," was released with 20 different artists performing a song from his sheet music book. Beck only played one song on that album. But in order to encourage people to learn the songs on their own, Beck has never released his own versions of any of these songs, except for the one he did on the "Song Reader" album ("Heaven's Ladder"). 

However, mostly in the summer of 2013, he played some of the songs in concert. Although I admire Beck's intentions with this project, these are songs he wrote and I want to hear his versions of them. So I've taken the one studio recording plus the best concert versions I could find, and made the best album "Song Reader" out of them that I could. I call it "Song Reader Live" to distinguish it from the various artists album also called "Song Reader."

The problem with making this album is that Beck has only rarely played these songs. A few of them were played at a handful of concerts, but others were only played once. As a result, I've had very limited options when it comes to bootleg recordings of them. Luckily, it turns out that most of them that he did play in public were recorded well at least once. But there are a few that sound rougher. I've put those near the end.

Even including the songs with less than ideal sound quality, I was only able to come up with 10 songs that are a total of 28 minutes long. That's pretty short for an album (and it's less than half of all the songs he wrote for this project). It so happens that he performed two other songs in the summer of 2013 that were only played at two concerts. These were specifically done for a musical collaboration with a choir. I stuck them on the end of this album, and that's increased the album length to 35 minutes. But none the recordings of those two songs sound fairly rough as well. Consider them bonus tracks of sorts.

The word "Edit" is added to the titles of two of the songs, "Please Leave a Light On When You Go" and "I'm Down." That's because there were some serious flaws in the performances I felt compelled to fix. For instance, with one of those songs (I forget which), he flubbed a section of the song and then redid it. I edited out the flubbed part.

I sincerely hope that someday Beck will officially release his own versions of these songs. But until then, this is the closest we've got.

01 Heaven's Ladder (Beck)
02 Please Leave a Light On When You Go [Edit] (Beck)
03 Sorry (Beck)
04 Just Noise (Beck)
05 I'm Down [Edit] (Beck)
06 Do We, We Do (Beck, Joan Wasser & Conor J. O'Brien)
07 Don't Act like Your Heart Isn't Hard (Beck)
08 Rough on Rats (Beck)
09 Now That Your Dollar Bills Have Sprouted Wings (Beck)
10 America, Here's My Boy (Beck)
11 Free Me (Beck)
12 Wake Up (Beck)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15127482/BeckH_2013_SongReadrLive_atse.zip.html

I made the album cover out of three different sources. The main image of the strangely dressed people playing musical instruments come from a poster for a November 2013 concert in Los Angeles that featured the songs from the "Song Reader" project. (Beck played, but he was only one of many musicians, so he only did a couple of songs.) I took Beck's name and the album title from another various artists "Song Reader" performance. I added the "Live" myself. Finally, to emphasize the sheet music theme, I added some sheet music visuals to the background.