SEA CHANGE was nominated for the 2003 Grammy Awards for Best Alternative Music Album.

This is an Enhanced CD, which contains both regular audio tracks and multimedia computer files.

Personnel: Beck (vocals, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, banjo, harmonica, piano, Wurlitzer organ, keyboards, synthesizer, glockenspiel, percussion, background vocals); Smokey Hormel (acoustic guitar, electric guitar, slide guitar, bamboo flute, saxophone, piano, percussion, background vocals); Justin Meldal-Johnsen (electric guitar, piano, glockenspiel, upright bass, electric bass, percussion, background vocals); Jason Faulkner, Jason Falkner (electric guitar, percussion, background vocals); Roger Manning (banjo, piano, harmonium, Clavinet, Wurlitzer organ, synthesizer, glockenspiel, percussion, background vocals); Suzie Katayama (cello); Nigel Godrich (keyboards, synthesizer, percussion); Joey Waronker (drums, percussion, background vocals); James Gadson (drums).

Audio Mixer: Nigel Godrich.

Recording information: Ocean Way Studios; Record One.

Unknown Contributor Role: Smokey Hormel.

Beck has always been known for his ever-changing moods -- particularly since they often arrived one after another on one album, sometimes within one song -- yet the shift between the neon glitz of Midnite Vultures and the lush, somber Sea Change is startling, and not just because it finds him in full-on singer/songwriter mode, abandoning all of the postmodern pranksterism of its predecessor. What's startling about Sea Change is how it brings everything that's run beneath the surface of Beck's music to the forefront, as if he's unafraid to not just reveal emotions, but to elliptically examine them in this wonderfully melancholy song cycle. If, on most albums prior to this, Beck's music was a sonic kaleidoscope -- each song shifting familiar and forgotten sounds into colorful, unpredictable combinations -- this discards genre-hopping in favor of focus, and the concentration pays off gloriously, resulting in not just his best album, but one of the greatest late-night, brokenhearted albums in pop. This, as many reviews and promotional interviews have noted, is indeed a breakup album, but it's not a bitter listen; it has a wearily beautiful sound, a comforting, consoling sadness. His words are often evocative, but not nearly as evocative as the music itself, which is rooted equally in country-rock (not alt-country), early-'70s singer/songwriterism, and baroque British psychedelia. With producer Nigel Godrich, Beck has created a warm, enveloping sound, with his acoustic guitar supported by grand string arrangements straight out of Paul Buckmaster, eerie harmonies, and gentle keyboards among other subtler touches that give this record a richness that unveils more with each listen. Surely, some may bemoan the absence of the careening, free-form experimentalism of Odelay, but Beck's gifts as a songwriter, singer, and musician have never been as brilliant as they are here. As Sea Change is playing, it feels as if Beck singing to you alone, revealing painful, intimate secrets that mirror your own. It's a genuine masterpiece in an era with too damn few of them. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Though 1998's MUTATIONS was the closest Beck had come at the time to conventional (read: non-ironic) troubadourisms, he quickly declared the album a detour and swiftly followed it up with the Prince-influenced about-face of MIDNITE VULTURES. It comes as something of a surprise, then, that he should focus his subsequent efforts on an unprecedentedly earnest singer-songwriter album like SEA CHANGE, which finds him purposefully peeling away his multiple levels of irony. Trumpeted in the press as a post-breakup album, SEA CHANGE has been called Beck's BLOOD ON THE TRACKS, and it's true that he'd never been anywhere near this emotionally naked before.

Sonically, he seems to have (at least momentarily) laid aside his R&B/hip-hop aspirations in pursuit of a late-'60s/early-'70s folk-rock aesthetic. Several cuts have a lazy, Gram Parsons-like country-rock tinge. On "Round the Bend," he delivers a moody, string-swathed lament obviously modeled on Nick Drake's "River Man." While some might lament the departure of the word-spinning wiseguy, SEA CHANGE still seems an inevitable and important step in Beck's artistic maturation.