Beck discusses Song Reader, do-it-yourself music project

The musician Beck’s latest project, “Song Reader,” is a collection of sheet music left to your own interpretation.

If you want to hear Beck’s song, you’ll have to play it yourself.

And Beck says, he feels like he’s learning a lot from hearing the songs played back. 

“One of the aspects of this project was to hear your own songs back in different ways that you hadn’t expected or thought possible,” he said.

He says he’s listened to many of the fan-recorded versions so far and the more far-out they are, the better. 

“I really feel like the sheet music versions are just a rough sketch of what it could be,” he said. 

In the past, the way sheet music was shared amongst family and friends was a big part of the social glue, Beck said. Though it’s difficult to imagine a time before recorded versions of songs.

Through this project, Beck says he hopes it will give him discipline — and the ability to think of the song writing craft as a bigger tradition. 

When he first broke onto the music scene in the 90s, Beck says he didn’t think his album would have enduring influence. He said he was amazed just to be in a studio, recording songs.

“I’ve noticed that any song that connected with people or got on the radio, in the studio there was no sense of anything important happening,” he said.

Even now, when he goes into the studio to record, Beck says, he rarely thinks about the bigger picture. And he never tries to make a cohesive body of work because he never though he would have a body of work. Or even that listeners would be interested.

“It’s very much just whatever’s happening in the moment and if you’re just doing something and letting loose and everyone’s laughing or having a good time, then that’s probably the difference,” he said. “I tend to put those songs on the record whereas maybe other bands are doing stuff like that but they keep it to themselves.