The albums every songwriter should listen to, according to Beck

There’s no formula to write the perfect pop song. If there had been some road-tested equation for what constitutes a chart hit, then record companies would be even more commercially aligned than they presently are. While the best pop songs are usually defined by the eras that they come from, Beck has a few albums that he would consider gold standards for anyone interested in writing pop hits.

Then again, Beck was never that focused on writing the next chart hit every time he walked into the studio. His discography has always been known for being slightly off-the-wall, and even when he started gaining success with ‘Loser’, it’s not like a folk-hip-hop piss take was destined to be a massive hit in the era of ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ and ‘Jeremy’.

If anything, Beck was to grunge music what Talking Heads were to punk rock. They both associated with the genres in their respective eras, but there was something much more art-rock in how they conducted themselves when making records, whether that was the sounds of Remain in Light or Odelay.

As the 1990s art rocker made his way into the 2000s, he became more fascinated when it came to writing pop and even had the roadmap of mandatory listening along with him, saying, “In a well-crafted song, something has to fly. You’re looking for something that can actually take off and go into the stratosphere. The classic, perennial songs are the ones that have wings; that become part of your everyday life, whether it’s the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper, Michael Jackson’s Thriller or Peter Gabriel’s So.”

But looking at every one of those albums, it’s not easy to see them being one-to-one comparisons with each other. While The Beatles and The Beach Boys were on the same wavelength, they weren’t necessarily working for audiences like Peter Gabriel did when releasing ‘Sledgehammer’ or Michael Jackson did when ‘Billie Jean’ took over the world.

It’s not only about the genre of music, though. Hell, it’s not even about the songs to some degree. The greatest strength of every one of those albums Beck mentioned comes from a fearlessness when it comes to working on something no one had heard before. Even though Brian Wilson and Michael Jackson may have been working in the same genres they were known for, people were still shellshocked the first time they heard ‘God Only Knows’ and ‘Beat It’, respectively.

And while The Beatles and Peter Gabriel both cared about the quality of the tunes over anything else, their career trajectories read like mirror images on Sgt Pepper and So. Whereas The Fab Four went from being one of the biggest names in pop to art-rockers making conceptual masterpieces, Gabriel had the audience come to him on So, flirting with pop music on ‘In Your Eyes’ while also giving fans something off the beaten path like the ballad ‘Mercy Street’ or ‘Don’t Give Up’.

Though Beck did flirt with some different musical hues on albums like Colours, whether it sold a million copies was beside the point. Like all the giants who came before him, Beck knew that following his heart and not caring what anyone thought was the reason why people like Gabriel and Wilson struck gold, and if he had that same mentality, no one else could have touched him.