Beck: "Looking for a Sign"

Beck hasn’t released an album since 2008’s Modern Guilt—a long time for the usually prolific artist. He’s been taking a hiatus of sorts from his own work, instead producing and collaborating with the likes of Stephen Malkmus, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Thurston Moore. Here and there over the past two years, however, we’ve gotten a small sampling of what Beck’s been up to on those rare occasions he’s alone. These songs have mostly come in the form of soundtrack contributions, and none of them have made big waves—Beck is a full-length album guy, and without company these scattered tracks seem to float away instantly.

“Looking for a Sign,” his contribution to the film Jeff Who Lives at Home, is not really any different. It’s a lovely, ethereal song in the vein of Sea Change (2002) with a gentle Dylan harmonica, airy acoustic guitar, and low piano to ground it. It’s engaging in the way it captures a particular sentiment, with Beck singing about a lover who’s no longer around, and the futility of behaving as though she is. The music matches this with a breezy, vast emptiness, and his voice seems to evaporate before lines like “Put my empty arms around you / Let the memory die away” are even finished.

But “Looking for a Sign” is just another lonely Beck song, lost without the anchor of an entire record. It doesn’t sound like much, but woven into a larger sonic story—one like the great album that he still has in him, in my dreams—it could be a whole lot more.