One year late, a chipper Beck ready with album

A year behind schedule, alternative rock icon Beck said Thursday that his new album will come out in October as the genre-spanning artist released an upbeat new song.

"Colors," which will come out on October 13, is the follow-up to Beck's somber 2014 "Morning Phase," which was the surprise winner of the Grammy for Album of the Year.

Beck had initially announced the latest album for October 2016 but pulled it without explanation, saying little about the project over the past year even as he played periodic shows.

Beck -- whose more than three-decade career has been marked by sharp reinventions in style -- appears to be back in a chipper state on "Colors" as he released a new song, "Dear Life."

The mid-tempo track opens with a jazzy piano that sets the rhythm for "Dear Life" as it progresses through rock guitar interludes over vocal harmonies.

The song is hardly one of the more experimental works by Beck, who won an avid fan base starting in the 1990s with his eclectic mishmashes of hip-hop, Mexican street music and other influences he heard around his native Los Angeles.

But the track indicates that "Colors" will largely be an upbeat album after Beck last year released two tracks, "Wow" and "Dreams," which both reach into electronic music and are listed on the album's tracklist.

"Wow," which has a touch of R&B, showed Beck's continued penchant for abstract, riddle-laden lyrics with lines such as, "Standing on the lawn doing jiu-jitsu / Girl in a bikini with a Lamborghini shih tzu."

Beck, in an interview with Rolling Stone, said that the album "could have come out a year or two ago."

"But these are complex songs all trying to do two or three things at once. It's not retro and not modern," he told the magazine.

"To get everything to sit together so it doesn't sound like a huge mess was quite an undertaking."

Beck recorded "Colors" with Greg Kurstin, who has become one of pop music's go-to producers after his work with Adele, notably co-writing the balladeer's smash hit "Hello."

Kurstin -- who has also worked with Paul McCartney, Sia and the Foo Fighters -- had a career break as the keyboardist in Beck's touring band.

Ahead of the release of "Colors," Beck will travel the United States as the opening act for U2, which is touring to mark the 30th anniversary of its classic album "The Joshua Tree."

source: AFP