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.

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.