New Music Friday: The best albums out Sept. 18
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A quick note before the show, this podcast contains explicit language.
Happy Friday, everyone, from NPR Music. It's New Music Friday. Each week, we talk about the best albums out this week with members of the NPR Music Network. Today, we are talking about new records from Beck, Beba Doobie, Carly Rae Jepsen, and more. But first, I want to welcome Robert Moore from Sonic Spectrum on Kansas City's 90.9 The Bridge. Back to the show. Robert, how are things in Kansas City?
They're great. The Chiefs won their opener, so the city's happy.
Yeah, boy, I really expected that team to circle the drain for longer than they did. And I'm a little resentful.
It's good to see Mahomes back.
It is. It is. Good for you. It's good that Kansas City Chiefs fans can finally get some good news.
Right. It's been a while.
It's
been like a
year. All right, well, let's kick off our discussion round. New album from Beck. Beck's new album is called Ride Lonesome.
She is gone You can't put your arms around a memory You know it's wrong Turn your heart into a gallery You've got to write You've got to turn
So Beck, for the none of you who don't know, is an artist who has been around for like 35 years now. He has trafficked in everything from kind of lo-fi folk to glossy funk to kind of stately, beautiful orchestral ballads. And this new album, Ride Lonesome, it's his 15th record. It's firmly in the camp of Beck in this kind of ruminative and extremely orchestral space. Songs that really unfold deliberately and slowly. He's surrounded by strings. These deep, rich, beautiful arrangements. And songs that reflect on a lot of loss. This is a sad record, but it's also a very, very beautiful record.
I initially, honestly, was hesitant when asked to talk about the album because, I mean, I'm a fan, but I would never have considered myself a massive fan. The last album that really blew me away was Sea Change, like, you know, many others. And I think Morning Phase tried to recapture that feel, but didn't quite do so, in my opinion. But upon hearing Ride Lonesome for the first time, honestly, I was speechless at first. I think it's his best in Sea Change, and it may even surpass it for me at some point.
Wow. Yeah. I mean, as you kind of alluded to, this record is very much in the spirit of the kind of subgenre of Beck music. I sometimes call Beck and Repose, you know, this kind of extremely kind of languorous, thoughtful music. And I'm really glad that he kind of is returning to this really stately sound, because as you said, this has some of his best music in ages.
I mean, he's always been a great songwriter, no matter what genre he's playing with. But I think, you know, bringing back the band from Sea Change and Morning Phase, as well as returning to United Studios, just that sound in that room, I mean, it really just comes across as just a beautiful recording. And for me, the secret weapon on this recording, honestly, is his father's string arrangements.
Wow.
Yeah, Beck's father, David Campbell, is a very, very veteran film composer. And I love the way that he is able to kind of marry contemporary classical music to folk music. And some of these songs really still feel like folk songs, even as the strings are swelling behind them. You know, a song like Slow Canyon feels like fully folk-estral music.
It's interesting, Robert, my colleague Otis Hart, when he was kind of presenting me with a list of the records that were coming out this week, he mentioned Beck is 56 years old. He's the exact age that Bob Dylan was when Time Out of Mind came out. And like, I still think of Beck as like such a youthful and playful and kind of constantly surprising and self reinventing figure.
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