Remember the ’90s, when gas was $1.09, cell phones were for emergencies, and Beck was BECK? Well, Beck remembers too, and he’s apparently aching to remind us all that he wasn’t always an aging caricature who had to try incredibly hard to make it seem like he, you know, wasn’t trying hard. Back in the ’90s? He just straight-up WASN’T trying hard, and when you listen back to those early amateur moments, it’s clear that he was an expert at it.
Thus, the sadly overwrought Beck of 2009 plans to capitalize big-time on his devil-may-care debut with the reissue of his 1994 slacker-folk album One Foot in the Grave on April 14th, with reportedly 16 additional songs tacked onto the original tracklist. Although this out-of-print beauty (which was recorded before — but released after — Beck’s breakthrough major label debut Mellow Gold) was originally released on K Records, it looks as though Interscope Records will handle the reissue.
The news of the reissue first appeared in Japanese paper Daily Yomiuri, which interviewed Beck before his Japanese tour this month. “Well, it’s been out of print for a few years, so it’s something we’ve been planning, but I knew that we had these extra tracks. I’ve actually been working on this for the past two or three years,” Beck tried hard to not try hard to tell the paper. “[On] the original tapes there were an extra maybe 30 songs that weren’t on the record and I picked the best… and added them on there, so it’s got about a little over a dozen extra tracks that no one’s heard before.” So there you have it: the best of the worst of the slacker’s expertly unhappy-proletarian junk folk... wait, what?
Anyway, in addition to the original One Foot, the three-song It’s All In Your Mind EP (that’s the original, not the Sea Change version, son) is also reportedly included, as is a batch of unreleased songs that have appeared only on bootlegs and/or songs that have only previously existed in Beck-lore but never heard (”Teenage Wastebucket,” “Piss On the Door”). So this whole is pretty exciting/confusing/meaningful/sad/awesome/ineffectual/essential, basically, depending on your point of view. Hey, kind of like how Beck himself is at this point!