Beck has shared another collaboration with Pharrell on track titled ‘Everlasting Nothing’ that will be on his next album ‘Hyperspace’ which arrives on November 22nd. In the meanwhile Beck sat down with The Sun to talk about the working process on the new album with Pharrell Williams. In what was meant to be a “year off” for Beck Hansen, he began to mess around with some songs he had started with Pharrell Williams. During downtime after an intense period of touring, Beck began to play around with ideas and sounds the two had come up with years earlier. Before he knew it, seven of Hyperspace’s 11 tracks with Pharrell were finished and Beck had made his 14th album — and one of his most collaborative.
“I thought maybe I’d come up with a single and release it next year, Then things accelerated. Within two months we pretty much had the whole thing together. And here I am.” Hyperspace is a minimalist album named after a video game Beck played as a youngster. He says: “It deals with anxiety and fears as well as the beauty and opportunities this age of technology brings us. I hadn’t really been making records for myself for years. So making this with Pharrell was something I needed to do. We’ve known each other for a long time. Then we ran into each other in elevators in hallways, at an awards show, and started hanging out.
“He always asks me if I am working, by which he means, ‘Am I in the studio?’ And when I said ‘yes’, he said: ‘I’d love to work with you, some time’. Then, the first time I walked into the studio in Miami with him, he said, ‘Sit down, I’ve just finished a song’. I sat down and he played the song Happy. I knew it was a worldwide smash-hit. It was really interesting being in that engine room of music culture while propagating these pieces of music so embedded in the culture.” Beck says it took “courage” to work with Williams, so in awe was he of the superstar songwriter and producer. didn’t know if I was good enough to work with Pharrell, Beck says. “He’s been involved with incredible tracks with people like Jay-Z, Snoop Dogg, Gwen Stefani, Justin Timberlake and Kelis. For a lot of years, I didn’t know if I could pull it off.” It was 2018 when the pair finally reconvened. The first track they made together was the spacey Everlasting Nothing, which closes out Hyperspace. Beck says: “I was just curious to see where working with him could go. I told him I was curious what his instincts would be when he thought of my music. And he said, ‘Well, we are going to make some Sgt. Pepper’s.
Which, of course, stirred my imagination!” Beck says: “It’s interesting how one of the ideas we worked on six years ago turned out. I didn’t know if they were going to fly at the time. But in a way, what Pharrell was doing with beats and sounds back then was ahead of its time, so they worked. I wanted to touch on this technological world we live in. Music is changing. Songs are getting shorter. Our ears are changing and our thoughts are changing. So a song like (album opener) Hyperlife talks about how technology has this way of making you want more and more.“