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5.  Beck – Sea Change – 2002 

 Breaking up with someone just isn’t fun(ny), especially if you’re still in love. 

So is the case with Mr. Post-Modern wise-ass, Beck, who apparently had a hard time conjuring up anything to laugh about in 2000, after ending a nearly 10 year relationship with designer Leigh Limon.  The result, Sea Change, might be the second best break-up record ever made (after, of  course, Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, see my great break-up albums list below).  

Reportedly Beck wrote all twelve of the songs for Sea Change in one week after the break-up, songs that express an entirely different side of one of the great, but difficult to characterize, artists of the last two decades.  Go back and listen to Beck’s work of the 1990’s (namely: Mellow Gold, Mutations, Odelay and Midnite Vultures).  Beck is very much the vocal actor, taking on an accent and tone for the part he is playing, be it brit-hipster (The New Pollution), the country bumpkin (Cancelled Check) or, in its most extreme, the neo-Prince impersonation throughout much of Midnight Vultures, his preceeding, slamming 1999 party-satire record. 

Beck and Leigh Limon

Beck’s character in Sea Change might actually be himself, and so I imagine we’re experiencing his creative sound, the voice he starts with as he writes, and man is this character in a bad way. 

Sea Change is produced by Nigel Godrich (Radiohead:  Kid A, et al, Paul McCartney:  Chaos and Creation in the Backyard), and no doubt part of the album’s appeal is its sound.  Most tracks start off with acoustic guitar and sad vocal, front and center, with all sorts of ear candy atmospherics surrounding the singer, orchestral strings and effected guitars enter and exit as if tiptoeing into and out of the songs, creating mood and intensity, but never overwhelming the simplicity and sadness of the music.  Beck, with 3 chords and the truth, creates a hipster Hank Williams, visiting from the Lower East Side.  He is sitting in the corner of your living room, playing for therapy, and hoping for direction out of his funk, a new girl, a shoulder to cry on. 

Unlike Blood on the Tracks, where Dylan tells many of his stories of heartbreak through the voices of angry third-party characters, Beck’s break-up record is pure first person.  He is singing to us, but he desperately wants her to hear it, almost as if he imagines mailing her the record and having her come running back into his arms days later asking forgiveness. 

It looks like it might have taken heartbreak to create the best set of songs Beck has ever written.  Sea Change is an addicting monologue on the frustrations of lost love and sadness that I believe will stand the test of time as his true masterpiece. 

Notable(s): 

My favorite Sea Change track:  “Lost Cause” – check out video below. 

10 Great Break-up Albums 

1. Bob Dylan – Blood on the Tracks – 1975
2. Beck – Sea Change – 2002
3. Fleetwood Mac – Rumours – 1977
4. Bruce Springsteen – Tunnel of Love – 1987
5. The Cure – Disintegration – 1989
6. Ryan Adams – Heartbreaker – 2000
7. Derek and the Dominos – Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs – 1970
8. Lucinda Williams – Essence – 2001
9. Kristin Hoffmann – Divided Heart – 2002
10. Jason Darling – Monster (unreleased) – 2009