Beck’s Record Club – An Album A Day
Now here’s an amazing sounding musical collaboration project, showing how much can be achieved in a day if you combine a professional attitude, a strong concept and a day in a recording studio.
Record Club is an informal meeting of various musicians to record an album in a day. The album chosen to be reinterpreted is used as a framework. Nothing is rehearsed or arranged ahead of time. A track is put up here once a week. As you will hear, some of the songs are rough renditions, often first takes that document what happened over the course of a day as opposed to a polished rendering. There is no intention to ‘add to’ the original work or attempt to recreate the power of the original recording. Only to play music and document what happens. And those who aren’t familiar with the albums in question will hopefully look for the songs in their definitive versions.
The current project is the Alexander ‘Skip’ Spence (of Jefferson Airplane) album ‘OAR’ – an album that already has something of Beck’s sound about it, and there have been 2 previous albums from the Velvet Underground and Leonard Cohen covered in this hasty fashion, put together by Beck and a heterogeneous mix of artists including Wilco, Feist, Devandra Banhart and many others. You can stream the music for each album from his site.